SteelyKid had her two-month check-up in Monday (her two-month birthday was Tuesday), and checking in with the medical profession means we’ve got the opportunity for some baby science. And it’s not science without graphs:
That’s SteelyKid’s weight as a function of time. Like most babies, she dropped a bit immediately after birth, but shot right back up, and has now been growing at a pretty good clip for the last eight-and-a-half weeks. We don’t have enough data points on her length to make a graph, but she’s increased substantially there, too, growing by 2.75″.
To put these changes in perspective, the same proportional change for me would mean gaining 100 lbs and 10.6″. In two months. While eating nothing but milk.
Babies are pretty amazing. Cute, too– don’t think I forgot about the weekly bison-for-scale picture:
As a bonus, you get not only her crib mirror, but also one of the happy little dinosaurs from her mobile. She’s actually grooving on the dinos in this picture, though five minutes later she morphed into Shrieky Baby, and I spent forty minutes carrying her around the house and yard trying to calm her down…
Whee!
To take this one step further, you can get the weight versus age percentile data from the CDC, do an interpolation, and see whether SteelyKid is staying in the same percentile, i.e. growing normally.
It’s also interesting to rent a baby scale and make measurements every few hours (i.e. with every diaper change) to get a sense of the intra-day variation in a baby’s weight.
To take this one step further, you can get the weight versus age percentile data from the CDC, do an interpolation, and see whether SteelyKid is staying in the same percentile, i.e. growing normally.
It’s also interesting to rent a baby scale and make measurements every few hours (i.e. with every diaper change) to get a sense of the intra-day variation in a baby’s weight.
“I spent forty minutes carrying her around the house and yard trying to calm her down…”
that’s what the swing is for…silly first time parent, I can only do so much….
cute kid by the way.
Her birth weight, length, and head circumference percentiles were 70th, 70th, and 90th.
Her 2-month percentiles were 50th to 75th, 50th, and 75th, according to her pediatrician.
By the year 2100 Steelykid will weigh 1968 lbs. Hadn’t you ought to get Al Gore on this? National economies must be sacrificed to Save Our Children!
One thing missing – error bars. No, seriously. My wife would freak out if one our children’s weight was off the “curve” a little bit. I tried to explain it in terms of error, but showing it on a graph would help. I would be interesting to measure the weight like 20 times in a day to get a measure of the weigh changes as well as measurement uncertainty. Oh wait – am I taking this too far. Yes. But still, that would be cool.
I’d say that most of the variation is in fluctuation of fluid intake, rather than measurement uncertainty. At this age, SteelyKid gets, what, something like 4oz of fluid at most at a time? So maximum fluctuation should be something like 8oz or 1/2 a pound, depending on the fullness of her various “reservoirs”. My wife also freaks out at off-curve statistics. She’s a scientist, but her emotional response to seeing the numbers required repeating my argument to reassert her rational one at every low weigh-in.