Dear Doctor,
It’s not that my baby doesn’t like you, far from it. Dagny actually enjoys meeting and interacting with new people. She’ll smile and babble and reach for the glasses on your nose. She’ll look around and laugh at random inanimate objects. Dagny is generally a well behaved and non-fussy child. Check out the attached graph created by trolling through reams of data with statistical sampling techniques.
Dagny's happiness chart drawn from large amounts of sample data
Being reasonable parents, we do our best to schedule appointments taking into account the probability of a feeding/napping. In other words, we know (thanks to Trixie Tracker) when Dagny likes to eat and sleep every day (see chart below).
Our goal is to nudge the timing and shoot to “reset” the happiness clock right before we put her in the car for a given errand. Generally this works really well, and our child arrives rested, well-fed, dry and generally happy as a clam (and typically smelling better).
But so far happiness for just about any member of your profession has eluded us. We wake her up, feed her and change her and get her in the car. By the time we arrive at the clinic, we are well into the chilling phase with occasional bouts of smiling. We check her in, and immediately fill out all the unnecessary paperwork.
We then sit and wait……
As we sit in the waiting room, Dagny will smile and babble and smile some more. Around the time a nurse calls us back, Dagny is chilling again. We’ll weigh her in and the nurse will gather all of the Viking Princess’ growth measurements. So far so good.
At this point in the visit, nurses are obligated to leave you alone in the exam room with the door closed. Dagny typically picks this time to start rubbing her eyes. A few minutes of that (and requisite yawning) and her eyes will catch one of the “Don’t get HIV” or “Mommy’s on the Run” posters and this will kick off giggling and cooing like a crazy psychopath. When manic, Dagny can get loud enough, that I’m sure the nurses in the hallway become fearful of the sounds emanating from inside our closed room. Shortly into the manic state, you (our doctor-du-jour) will knock and come into the room.
Too late.
The peak has passed and whining and nonstop bitching has commenced. Typically, the only way out is to put Dagny down and reset the clock once again. But you need to do things, and these things prevent sleep.
And this is why you must think our child hates you. The nurses have seen the other side of that manic peak and think she’s a cutey, but the same is not true for you. And so, at the end of the appointment, we put our child back in her car seat and she crashes and sleeps all the way home and the cycle resets anew.
Signed,
Dagny’s Parents
PS: This cycle has become so predictable at any medical clinic that we no longer try to show up early (or even on time) to fill out the paperwork and grab a chair in the influenza-filled waiting room. Since y’all are going to make us wait 30 minutes every time, we now just show up 15 minutes late and split the difference — this serves to shorten the amount of back end bitching from our daughter.
Dagny's sleep schedule is fairly predictable and can be nudged a little this way and that without too much effort.
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