FROM NORMAL TO "GEANT"

April Write-Away Contest - Growing

Pookie when she owned my son she had her personal Empire State Building

When my son was born and I saw him for the first time, I found him normal. The only things I noticed which seemed a little strange to me were his hands and feet, they were quite big. He was bald but had in the middle a line of blond upstanding hairs which made him look like a punk. His ears too were big and not at the same level. But these were only details, I didn't belong to mothers who find their babies beautiful even if they look like wrinkled dwarfs.

The whole family especially on the Italian side had knitted little baby shoes in yellow or light green, because they didn't know if it was a boy or a girl and I had a stock to dress the feet of a whole orphanage. The once I had brought to the hospital were already too small. I left them there.

At home I dressed him in the baby outfits I had got, very beautiful once, but after 2 weeks I realized to my surprise that they became to small, Baby grew. His length at birth was 51 cm (20) which is not big and completely normal. We had a little baby basket for the first weeks, very cute, but that too only lasted 3 weeks and then it became too small. So I moved him in a normal baby bed. With one months, he had to wear size 4 months and he grow. I was very proud to have such a big baby and thought he will be a nice big man. After three months he didn't fit in the pram anymore and it became complicated to carry him around. He couldn't sit yet, but was too big for the pram, all these nice things you find today to carry even big babies didn't exist. So we bought a stroller. I had to pay attention that he didn't fall out and it was a whole story to get him fasten in correctly.

I started learning to say : "yes he is tall, but he is only 3 months old" to avoid suspicious glances about the fact is he retarded or not. But all this didn't bother me.

He developped well especially in height. With 2 years he had the size of a four year old. I only was in constant worry that people treated him like a two year old toddler and not like a 4 year old boy.

When he was about 7 and still grew very fast I tried to put in his mind that tall people have an advantage over the others, they can overlook everybody and if they would tease him he at least could even spit on their heads. Of course I hoped he would not do it. But I feared that he would walk with his head between the shoulders and the back bent to seem smaller as a lot of big people do. Fortunately that helped and he always stretched himself even higher to show that he was the biggest !

With 14 it got problematic when we travelled by plane. There was no room enough for his legs. Sitting he looked completely "normal" but when he got up and people looked at him, they got their necks twisted. We had to ask a place for disabled people. He found that wonderful because he always had the best places, and we were squeezed somewhere with the other passengers.

The city asked him to join the Basket Ball players, he was the tallest. His length made him rather famous. He was asked to get cats down from trees, to pick up balls from roofs and he was very helpful at home. I didn't need a ladder to pick up something high on the wardrobe or to screw a bulb in a ceiling lamp. He made fun of his grandma by checking on the wardrobe for dust. At school he had to sit behind not to take the view of the others and enjoyed the fact that he could look down on every teacher. And he still grew. At 18 he mesured 1.96 (6.4) and I never could loose him even in the biggest crowd he always was at least half a head bigger.

At the frame of our kitchen door I mesured him twice a year and put down the year and the heights. It's still there

. When he was 20 and 2m (6.6) he stopped growing. He really was relieved, he didn't want to go in the Guiness Book of Records. 2m was long enough. Meanwhile he called his father my "little one" or "little dad" which was not quite justified because Mr. Gattino mesures 1.89 m.

When we were invited somewhere we showed up like a circus trio, he in the middle with his arms around his "little" parents. We also got used to the fact that wherever we went people looked at us and exclaimed : Is he tall ! I was happy he didn't have any complex about his length, for me it was the most important matter. But he was worried about his weight. He was too slim ! With his 2 m his weight was only 76 kg (167). So he started to do something quite unic in our today's slim world, he tried to put on weight ! For that he had a special diet with can food plenty of vitamines and stuff to get fat. He managed to get to 82 kg (185) which was already much better, because it also had always been a problem to find the right clothes. Or they were long enough and far too large, or they fit but were far too short.

Of course a lot of anecdotes happened to him because of his length, with which I could fill another post.

When I saw the word "growing" for the April Write Away contest I couldn't think of nothing else but the fast growing of my son !

At Kindergarten, 4 yrs old, the blond boy besides the kindergarten teacher.

Last year with his god mother and her husband