Thursday, March 22, 2012

Big, Little Sister

As Abby gets older and more mature she has begun to notice some of the subtle things that make her different from kids her own age. Her bald patches. Her flapping. The way she can't quite keep up. Her falls. The thing that bothers her the most is her small stature. She is almost five and she weighs 32 pounds. This puts her in the 6th percentile. She is 39 inches tall which puts her in the 5th percentile.

At this point her docs are pleased that she is ON the charts at all and that she's following her own little curve. But try telling her that. She has a twin sister who weighs about 8 pounds more and is about 3 inches taller. When people comment about how much smaller Abby is she will often burst into tears. She has been known to yell at people that she is, in fact, THE OLDER SISTER!

We have started calling her the Big, Little sister. She may be smaller but she will always be one minute older. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it just irritates her. Most of the time we just ignore it but sometimes it makes me a little sad. Not that she's small, that part is just fine by me (I was always the smallest kid). That it bothers her. That's what gets me.

No matter how hard we work to "normalize" things for her she will always be a little "different". It was a heck of a lot easier when she didn't realize that. We do not take the approach of babying her or trying to explain it away. Being different is just fine and that's the approach we take. I just wish there was a way we could make it all easier for her.

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