The Trouble With Gigantic Toddlers

I’ve written before about my big babies.

Both of my kids were over 9 pounds at birth and barreled through their infancies around the one-hundredth percentile for their heights and weights. If my daughter was a bigger baby and toddler, then my son is comparatively monstrous.

My daughter’s weight and height started to simmer when she was around 2 or 3 years old, and now, at the age of 7, she’s relatively average. Thank God.

My son, though. He’s an entirely different kettle of humungous fish.

For starters, this isn’t just a weight issue. While still a hefty boy, the docs are more worried about his height — he’s the average weight and height of a 4-year-old boy, currently.

I feel like that’s excessive, mostly because he just turned 2. My doctor agrees with me — he’s too big.

Beyond the obvious growing pains and general clumsiness you might expect in one growing too quickly, his size is more than just a physical issue; although, it is a potential problem medically.

Toddlers and children who grow too large too quickly could stop growing too early as well, resulting in an adult who is shorter than most other adults. There are also a few disorders that involve too-early puberty and hormonal imbalances in cases such as these, which can cause a plethora of unfavourable problems.

I can’t allow my stressed-out mommy brain to consider any of those possibilities right now, so I’ll move on.

There are so many things that affect him differently than his normal-sized peers. For example, as such a big boy, he’s frequently mistaken for an older child. I often see strangers smile down at him (he has a perma-grin plastered to his face and his smiles draw in strangers all the time) and try to talk to him as though he can say more than “hello” or “boo guck” — which is “blue truck” for those of you who don’t speak Toddler fluently.

I’m getting a little tired of hearing “oh my, he’s a big fella!” after I’ve explained why he doesn’t always have the right words to respond when they expected the mental capacity of a 4-year-old.

While I’m thrilled that he’s healthy and growing like a weed, there are some issues with having such a big boy when he’s still so young — some of which could be serious, as I’ve said.

In general, it’s often a giant pain in the butt, pun intended.

Big boys have big falls

Kids fall down a lot.

It’s how they learn to maneuver their bodies and how they discover their physical limits. And while it’s never fun when a child falls off of the slide at the playground or takes a swan dive off the couch, when toddlers are smaller — literally 10 to 15 pounds smaller, according to the averages — they are less likely to seriously injure themselves. Or at least, they appear to be less likely.

My not-so-little guy, however, falls hard.

He’s had more golfball-sized goose eggs on his head than I’d care to admit and more than once I nearly took him to the emergency room due to my concern about his frequent injuries. He’s always been perfectly fine, of course, but he’s a big bruiser and I am a little tired of having a mini heart attack every time I see him take a tumble.

I’ve watched other kids do the same thing and they literally bounce back up and run off as though it never happened.

It hardly seems fair.

Maybe I’m overreacting as any seasoned helicopter mom might but I genuinely don’t give a hoot. All I know is that I escaped my childhood without a broken bone and I’d really like to keep that streak going with my kids.

I realize that may be a pipe dream but the heart wants what it wants.

A gentle giant

My son is what you might consider a gentle giant, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

He plays with some of the other kids in the church nursery but they tend to shove him aside a lot, as toddlers are wont to do around his age. Toddlers don’t like to share or play nicely with other people and that’s a pretty normal thing for kids that age.

My son is something of a unicorn in this area, and it’s probably a good thing because he’d hurt someone if he wasn’t such a gentle guy.

When a toy is taken away from him, he just wanders off and finds a new one. When that toy is subsequently taken, he repeats the process. He likes to share with kids; he likes to give them his toys to see what they do with them, and you can see the wheels working in his head when he does this.

You can also see the little quiver in his lip each time his preferred toy is taken away unfairly, and that breaks my heart a little bit.

The problem is that he’s not really learning to deal with conflict the way that other kids do, and while that’s probably a relief to the other parents in the room as they watch their smaller child dominate my larger one, he’s not learning to say no.

He’s learning instead that most of the time, people are happy to push him around and face no consequences.

Now, I’m not saying that he should deck every kid who takes something from him, but the fact that he doesn’t even try to defend himself makes me worried that he’ll end up being walked all over in his younger years, merely because he’s a big bruiser and people will assume they can push him around because he’s “tough.”

He might be big, but he’s a sensitive guy. I think this is a common misconception about big guys, if my college boyfriend (a big but gentle football player) is any indication.

I’d like my son to learn to play exactly the way that other kids do, but since they could get legitimately hurt in the process, that probably won’t happen. How I’ll teach him about conflict and resolving it is beyond me at this point, but I’m sure we’ll figure it all out.

I hope.

I just wish other kids would play with him, too. I suspect his size is a deterrent, and that makes me so sad for my baby. If they got to know him, they’d see that he’s a super cool dude!

Travelling is tricky

I switched my son out of the infant car seat when he was about 4 months old because he was the size of an 8-month-old baby at that point.

Yes, you read that correctly. He has always been massive.

I had to switch him because I physically couldn’t carry him anymore in the car seat carrier and he’d reached the height capacity anyway. The same thing happened with my son’s bassinet, which he most inconveniently outgrew in 2.5 months — I’d become used to this trend by the time it was time for a new car seat.

I wish I could say the car seat is the only travelling inconvenience with a bigger baby and toddler, but it’s not.

Take travelling overnight, for instance — something it is hard enough when you have little kids, but made worse with bigger babies.

My parents live in town and very graciously take the kids overnight every now and then to give us a break, and we so appreciate the time. My mom pointed out to me the last time we talked about another Grandparent’s sleepover that my son had exceeded the weight limit for the Pack n’ Play.

This must-have item was something I had used for my son when he was a baby whenever we travelled, and I recall being frustrated that we were never even able to use the bassinet attachment due to its teeny weight capacity.

As it happens, that wasn’t the only weight capacity that would cause grief in his young life.

My son is 2 and still sleeps in his crib, thankfully, and will hopefully do so for another year. That means that we need to keep his sleeping situation relatively uniform even when travelling; he needs those four walls to contain him.

Scratch that — I need those four walls to contain him.

Allowing him to wander about freely in my parents’ house in the dead of night would give every adult involved a major headache. It might also show him a world of freedom that he’s never before been privy to, and who knows what can of worms that might open up.

I’d really, really rather not find out. I’m not ashamed to admit that the idea terrifies me.

Thankfully, I have an extra playpen that we used for diaper changes (long story, you can read all about that silliness here) that, upon further inspection, has a higher maximum weight limit and will work for my big boy.

So, phew.

What the heck, though? Why is it so hard to find simpler solutions to our big boy’s needs? Why would they make a pack n’ play so small in the first place? I have so many questions.

I doubt I’ll ever learn the answers, but I assume the word “profit” is in there, somewhere.

They’re too damned BIG

Travelling isn’t the only time having a too-big toddler causes trouble.

For one, it can be painful. I frequently tweak a muscle when swiftly picking up my boy — something that all parents know is a necessary thing to do from time to time. For instance, sometimes he’s less than cooperative while waiting to cross the street and it is my duty to scoop him up to prevent him from running off, causing himself unthinkable harm.

It’s hard to haul up 40 pounds of kid on the fly. It’s even harder to haul up 40 pounds of kid on the fly after having tweaked your back.

I think one of my favourite things about babies and toddlers is holding them, so this whole thing kind of sucks. His bedtime is another example where holding him is more difficult than it is for parents of normal-sized toddlers — my son barely fits on my lap as we read bedtime stories and snuggle before bed, and he’s rapidly growing out of this capability as the months creep forward.

Physically, he’s too big but developmentally, he still needs his mother to cuddle him. It’s getting harder and harder to meet this need, and as he’s my last baby, this kills me.

While it’s true that he’s bigger than most of his peers and he’s heavy and awkward to carry and nothing ever fits, he’s still just a toddler. He’s a baby.

He’s my baby.

And on nights like tonight, when he snuggles deeply into my chest, cozy and safe in his favourite excavator pj’s, he somehow doesn’t seem so big. As I stroke his baby-soft hair and he clutches his bunny stuffy with his pudgy little fingers, I realize that he’s still so very little.

I also realize that once again, I can entirely relate to the crazy mother in I’ll Love You Forever and my husband will have to hide the ladder from me when my son moves out.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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