Growth

I don't think I'm going out on a limb here when I say almost every kid brought home from an international adoption is going to be getting better nutrition, better physical activity, more 1 on 1 love, basically everything needed for growth. And I'm talking physical growth as in height and weight. And, again not too much of a stretch (pardon the pun), but most kids are smaller than their peers when they first get home.

So just about everyone you hear about says their kid makes a major growth spurt (larger than a regular growth spurt) 4 to 9 months after being home. Of course it's highly dependent on the genetic height the child will eventually grow to, so some kids are going to only have a modest growth spurt while others might have major ones.

We're not overly worried about Andrei's height because both Stef and I are short so even if he ends up being average height or even slightly below average he'll be taller than either of us.


But really seems to be eating a lot more lately and we've heard that a sign that they're about to get a growth spurt. So we'll see. We've been tracking his height, weight and head circumference since we got the referral. And like most of the Russian kids they start out pretty low on the percentile scores. Andrei was like in the 3rd percentile for both height and weight until we got him home. Although he always had a much higher percentile in head circumference, which was one of the things we were always thankful of. The concept being that the body takes care of the most important organ (the brain) by making sure it gets the lion share of fuel and thus grows the most even when the rest of the body doesn't.

We're nearly at his 2nd birthday (two more weeks, we're getting pretty excited around here) and Andrei has already moved up from the around the 3rd percentile in height to nearly the 15th percentile. So he's definitely growing up to whatever his normal height will be.

Interestingly his head circumference is at about the 60th percentile. But as I said, that was always doing well. In fact while in Russia and his height was around the 3rd percentile his head circumference was around the 45-50th percentile. The bottom line is that what all these numbers mean is that he is growing faster than the normal growth curve due to him catching up with his genetic growth expectation.

And until he levels off (i.e., achieving the same percentile month after month), we won't really know what that genetic growth expectation is. But remembering that I'm 5'6" or approximately the 10th percentile, he's certain to tower over me. As Stef says, "Well, at least someone in the house will be able to reach the tall shelves."