There and back - and there and back again...

Yesterday was Becca's two-year checkup. Now normally I like it when my kids have their well-baby/kid checks. It's an opportunity to see how much they've grown, have a few minutes with our pediatrician to talk over concerns or questions and show off my kids to the office staff. I absolutely love our doctor, the nurses and everyone at the office - they know and remember our kids from visit to visit. And I feel like they take any concerns that we have seriously.

There is only one thing that I wish I could change about our pediatric office - the location. You would think that it would be very convenient - I work downtown, and our pediatrician is located downtown, in the same building as my ob/gyn actually. It's literally about a 5-minute drive from work.

Work, which is where I am during the day. My kids are at daycare. Which is very conveniently located close to home. Conveniently for everything except doctor's appointments, that is.

You see, even though my commute really isn't bad at all (it's about a 10 to 15 minute drive from home to downtown on most days) it's multiplied when I have to take one of the kids into the pediatrician, especially if the appointment is in the middle of the day, like yesterday's was.

Becca's appointment was at 11:30 am. Ok, I figured I'd take her over my lunch hour. And the actual appointment itself did only take less than an hour.

But it was the 15 minutes it took to drive from work to daycare, then the 15 minutes to drive from daycare back downtown to the pediatrician's office. Then repeated in reverse again afterward - 15 minutes from pediatrician to daycare and finally the 15 minutes from daycare back to work. Add in the time spent talking a toddler into getting in and out of her coat, strapping her in and taking her out of the carseat...

Yep - one simple doctor's appointment ends up taking up a 2-hour chunk of my day! Usually I try to schedule appointments for the kids first thing in the morning if possible - it cuts down on at least a little of the 'back-and-forth', like a ping-pong ball feeling. But since I had to reschedule this one from when I was sick last week, we had to take what we could get.

The actual appointment went well. No shots this time! Becca is in about the 75th percentile for both height and weight. She's about 34 1/2 inches tall - and she did a pretty good job of standing for them to measure her height. In the quick glimpse that I got of the scale during the split second that she stood on it before grabbing desperately for me, it appears that she weighs 29.6 pounds. Or thereabouts. There are days when it feels like she weighs 50 pounds... I'll have to check the baby books tonight to see how she compares to the other girls at this age. Abby was always big and Hannah was always small, so it's fun to see where Becca fits in.

Becca is such a funny little Punkin - so different from the other two girls who are very social and love to say hi to the staff, show off what they can do to the doctor, etc. Becca has no interest in any of that. She clung to me the entire time and had no interest in the board book that the doctor gave her to take home, or the sticker she could've picked out after we were done. She's such an independent, bossy, always-on-the-go girl at home that I sometimes forget how shy she actually is in public.