First Encounter with British Health Care

Today Addison had her first visit with a "Health Visitor." Over here your child's development and growth up through kindergarten age is monitored by health visitors which are usually nurses. You only go to the doctor (General Practitioner - GP) when you are sick. For babies, they usually come out to your home for the initial visit, but since Addie was more than a few days old we had to make our made way up the big clinic in Market Deeping (that's the nearby village with the big medical practice is). Paddi was very nice and she had worked in the States for 15 years, so she was very familiar with how I was used to things in America. We sat in a room that they do the weekly "check up" clinics in to visit about immuninizations and general develop things to know about Addie. It was pretty cold in the room so when she asked me to get Addie down to her birthday suit to weigh and measure her I felt pretty bad for my baby. At Dr. Carlson's office they used to heat up the room and lay down heated blankets when Addie would come in. She fussed but she's tough. She weighed 9.4 kg and was 68.5 cm long (that's 20 lbs and 27 inches long) so she's in the 91st percentile in weigh still and 50% in height. She's starting to slow down in the growth spurt. There were a few things that I was advised to start trying with Addie now that she was 8 months old. In terms of food, we could start mashing up food from our plates at dinner for her to eat. Hard thing is that she's hungry at 5PM and Kevin gets held up at work until at least 6:30 each night. Paddi recommended that I start feeding her whole milk in her cereal in the morning, "Greek" style yogurt and mixing fruit with it (not the sugar loaded kid stuff), and try to get her eating a Wheatabix biscuit for breakfast. (Wheatbix is like a Shredded Wheat biscuit type food). Well I still had Addie on Stage 1 foods which means everything is finely pureed and any kind of texture usually freaked her out. She was doing just fine but I didn't want her getting behind on food I guess so being the over anxious and bought it all that afternoon. Needless to stay she revolted on me and decided she didn't want to eat anything for the next few days. Duh, Corrina - baby steps on changing our routine! The nice thing about it all was that she got so mad about the solid foods that when I gave her the bottle she grabbed hold of it and fed herself for the first time. She even did it one handed (I think she gets that bit from her dad)...no double gripping for this little girl! Overall the first health visit was okay, but for my first child it's probably good that I don't know any better about the way things are suggested in the US because it seems like some things could be quite different here.