Another item that I had been oblivious to was that babies need pediatricians as soon as they are born. This translates to – pick out a pediatrician before your baby is born. Having last been at the pediatrician when I was 11 I hadn’t thought about these people for a long while but Sarah, who is on top of things, let me know on Monday afternoon that we should go to the pediatrician open house at the same place where she goes to see her obstetrician. This was a private practice office that isn’t a part of a specific hospital. They seemed like very nice people and are only a two-minute walk from our condo so they appeared to have the deal sealed in my mind. But since they were recruiting new patients the office had a nice little spread of cheese, crackers, cookies, grapes, and juice for the pregnant women and me to chow down on while they explained the history of the practice and how it works to sign-up for them. They explained that their practice is very large which made me envision a five hundred person team who all were working on my future child’s health and well being but under further inquisition I learned that big means that they have 8 people, four doctors and four nurse practitioners. These eight people see thousands of kids. The solution to always seeing the same doctor problem is that they assign a doctor/NP pair to your kid who you generally meet with when you have your appointments.

Among the decisions to make, which I am not opposed to, is that they won’t accept a new kid if the kids aren’t going to have their vaccines. Vaccines have become a battlefront issue since some parents think that vaccines cause autism. Luckily the head of the practice mentioned to us - “frankly we have no idea what causes autism”. That was reassuring. But she did explain that there isn’t any mercury in the vaccines they give and mercury, the cause of mad hatter’s disease, is only involved in vaccine shots for the flu and we generally give those to old people and not babies so that wouldn’t cause autism, just early senility. They went over their neutral position towards circumcision. I paid some attention to what they were saying but had trouble worrying about circumcision when we are having a girl. It is good to know this since if we had a boy we would probably circumcise him and wouldn’t want one kid to go to one pediatrician while the other kid went to another. We also need to worry about latching, which is that the baby can grab on and start feeding from Sarah’s breast. But we shouldn’t worry much in the first few days since babies do a lot of things randomly at first. And we need to make sure that the baby doesn’t get jaundiced because if she does she’ll need to go under lamps.

Some parents were worried about the kids mixing between sick and healthy in the waiting room but I think it’s best to just get sick while you are young. You can’t shelter people from germs their whole life. It isn’t healthy.

In all it was fun to go and check out the pediatricians office and especially a good time because they had good cheese. If they have good cheese all the time maybe I’ll camp out there.