Char woke me up at seven this morning with a slap on the ass and a too-cheery Get up. I made Kevin a doctor's appointment and he has to be there by eight. She was already dressed and ready to go, but I needed a few minutes and a cup of coffee to reach coherency. The kids were dragging their asses around the house, too, which made Char's good mood all the more irritating. She kept me up until two, so she should have the common decency to be half awake, too, I think.

She took Kevin to his appointment while I took Alex and Rachel to school, but just as I dropped them off she called me; Kevin is fine and can go back to school tomorrow, but the pediatrician wanted to discuss evaluating Kevin for his potential adult height.

I had no idea how we got from just wanting to know if he was contagious still to how tall will he be, but I headed for the doctor's office and waited among the booger laden and coughing kids for the doctor to have a few more minutes to talk to us.

Long story short, Kevin asked him for the fifth time (after the usual weigh and measure; he's grown a tiny bit in the last couple of weeks) how tall he was going to get. It's a major worry for him; he's not exactly obsessive about it, but close to it. Either the doctor is tired of being asked, or because Kevin brings it up every time he's there, he thought it was time to give Kevin some actual information instead of a ball park guess. I have not been in favor of even guessing, hoping he'll come to understand he can't change what he'll grow to, but Char thought it was time to end his personal torment.

After getting information on Kevin's birth parents (requiring a call to Brad to double check on the birth father's height) his forearm and leg were x-rayed, and we waited while all the information was relayed to a pediatric endocrinologist. The wait gave us time to take him to lunch and discuss how he would feel about the outcome, and to make sure he understood that no matter what the endocrinologist said, he could end up taller or shorter, and it really didn't matter if he was barely five feet tall or taller than I am. He said he got that he probably would never be as tall as Mom, or even Rachel, but he just wanted to know.

Fair enough.

When we went back to the doctor's office he was a little wound up, but he sat very quietly in the exam room while we waited a little bit longer. The doctor, one of the reasons we like him, talked to Kevin and barely to us, and explained that the endocrinologist would do more detailed measurements later, but based on the spacing in his growth plates, his biological parents' heights, his environment, how much he's grown in the last year, and nutrition-obsessed mother, he could probably expect to reach between 5'8"-5'10".

Even with further measuring off the x-rays, it'll be just a guess, but Kevin thinks he can live with the idea of being a little bit shorter; all he wanted was to be average.

Somehow this news called for celebratory homemade cookies; I won't argue with his logic, because hell, cookies.