Bella's 18mth Check-Up

I love my baby. Have I mentioned that? b/c I really do. She's just the best and she makes me a better a person. Having her in my life makes me realize that I was just whiling away the minutes, hours, days, months, years... just waiting to meet her.
:o)
Bella turns 18mths on the 18th of July, but her 18 Month Check-Up was today. Just a few days off, no biggee. We dropped Lee off at work after lunch and went to the appt. Lee couldn't come with us b/c he had a meeting (the man has meetings all the damn time, I swear!) but that's ok. I don't think Lee's been to a Well Baby check up since Bella was 6mths. He was TDY for her 9mth, then he was TDY again for her 12mth and today a meeting thwarted him for the 18mth. We arrived right at 12:45 (appt was for 1pm) and got checked in at the Pediatric Clinic, then sent over to the Well Baby station, where I had to undress Bella (which she loves, my little nudist!) and fill out a 5 page booklet about her day-to-day activities. Before I'm done with Page 1, the P.A. calls Bella's name to get her weighed and measured. She's now 33.25 inches long and 25.13 pounds. That's a gain of almost 3 inches and over 3 pounds since her 12 Month Check Up! :o) She's now in the 75th percentile for weight and 95th for height! Big Girl!
Everything was checked out, eyes, ears, throat, tummy, chest, back, hoo-hoo, everything. She's perfectly healthy and happily advanced on all the checkpoints except for 2 things. She isn't very good at drinking out of a cup (not a sippee, an actual cup) w/o spilling and she still isn't very good at getting a spoonful of food from plate to mouth w/o dropping most of the contents. But all the other checkpoints, she blazed through without a worry. :)
She had to get her DTAP shot today. And you know what's crazy? She didn't cry. Not one single wail. In the past, she's done her "hurt" cry. It's where she does the silent cry for a few seconds, then wrenches her face up for the wail, and then BOOM, big scream! But today? I put her on the gurney, told her that it's no big deal, just a tiny little shot. She watched the PA give it to her, flinched a bit, then looked at him, then to me, then I hopped her off the gurney and she looked at the PA and said, "Bye-ee" and waved, and off we went. NO TEARS! No cries, not anything! I was amazed! As was ev1 in the Immunization Clinic! LOL I couldn't believe that my baby totally manned up! I mean, I can never recall, at all, screaming for shots. My parents say that I never cried during shots, from 2yrs on. I remember getting shots when I was 4 and I just watched the nurse do it while my sister screamed bloody murder, but I never thought that a tolerance for pain could be hereditary. :o) Such an awesome baby that I have. :)
I was also told that Bella is perfectly on par with how she should be growing, emotionally and physically. She has her Stranger Anxiety with adults that she doesn't know, and she likes to hide in my legs when there's people around trying to talk to her that she isn't familiar with, but I guess that's normal in an 18 month old. Dr Westen said that she'd like to see Bella fully potty trained at her next appt (2years) and I told her that I was going to start working on it after her 18mth bday.
All in all, a great check-up for Bella and peace of mind for mommy. :o)