K.I.D. Positive - 2 month wellness check

I'd known for over a month that Herbert's 2 month checkup wasn't going to be pleasant. The shitty doctor (he's a man with that 'it's all in your head' type of personality) had informed us at his last checkup that his 2 month well visit would include about 5 different immunizations. Three pokes total and an oral vaccine. I had known this and yet, I waited until the night before his visit to start reading up and freaking out about it. Mothers shared their horror stories of babies who reacted harshly and adversely to the shots. Mothers who had lost their children shortly after immunization. Harrowing tales of new moms trying to do the right thing, ignoring their instincts in the name of just going along with the program. 

I cried and I cried and I cried some more.

I called my mom at 5 in the morning to express my fears and though she assured me that everything was going to be okay, I still found it in me to cry nearly the entire doctor visit. Oh, speaking of that, my boy has doubled his birth weight! He weighed in at 12lbs. 9.5oz., 24in. long. That's up from the 6lbs. 7oz. 19in. at birth. So that went well. He was being such a good baby the entire visit leading up to the shots. He even knocked out in my arms. Then came the executionurse. 

She had a little container with several syringes in it and instructed me to put Err-Bear up on the table. With little to no foreplay, she stuck my baby three times. Two in one leg, one in the other. And he cried. Oh, my baby cried so hard durng those shots. His little face turned red and purple. He screamed and my heart broke into a thousand helpless little pieces. As soon as she was finished, I picked him up and he did those pathetic sounding cries that broke the pieces of my already broken heart into even smaller pieces. They had said that the most common side effects were being extra sleepy/fussy, soreness in his legs and he might could run a low grade fever. He seemed to be in a sort of stupor when we put him back in the car seat. He didn't cry. He just sort of stared out. We got everything we thought he might need at Walgreens and I cried some more waiting for my baby to wake up screaming, like so many other mothers had described. 

Nothing.

Not only was my baby's appetite just fine, he was as energetic as he always was. He used his legs to push up while adjusted himself on my chest. He even smiled a few times. If not for the superhero band-aids on his legs, you wouldn't have even known the kid had gotten shots in the first place. He didn't even run a fever. And that was another thing! For the first time since birth, he looked at ME. Not in my general direction. At ME. And he smiled AT ME. I had prayed to the Lord to give him peace and calm and the good Lord pulled through in a major way. I probably should have prayed for my own calm, but it's okay. All's well that ends well.