It's Raining Percentiles

This morning I woke up, listened to the patter of raindrops, and thought, How weird for Karston, it's raining. Then I remembered that we've been in a severe drought since he was born, so he really has very little experience with rain. (Not that we would leave him out in the rain, I mean that he hasn't seen much rain through a window.)

I notice that people often ask for a relative measure of Karston's size. The fact that he weighs about 14 pounds at 20 weeks old now is one thing, but how that compares interests more people. The CDC provides growth charts so you can compare to the U.S. distribution. You could download the PDFs to print and then plot by hand, but there's free software for Macintosh OS X called Growth Charts that does it for you. (Don't ask: I don't do Windows, so I don't know.) Eyeballing those charts leads me to guess at these percentiles for weight, length, and weight-to-length ratio from his pediatrician visits:

	birth	3 days	2 weeks	1 month	2 months	4 months
weight	12	7	25	38	25	15
length	75	75	50	45	18	25
W:L	x	x	10	25	50	25

So he's small, with a tendency to be taller than his weight by percentile comparison. Since he prefers to be carried rather than pushed in his stroller or set on his play yard, and he is healthy, and I end up carrying him a lot, I think I like having the skinny baby. Plus his happy smiles and flirty eyes really brighten a dreary overcast rainy day like today!