She just bends that way.

I've spent the past weeks, I guess really months, growing ever more concerned about my little girl.

It probably started sometime around Christmas (I swear I'm not a bad Mom - she's just a third child!).... She would complain about a sore knee.... need me to kiss it better; even though there was nothing for me to see.

You brush those little things off... you know, assume she must've bumped in on something, maybe fell down.

And then a week or so later, the knee again - or was it the other one this time? It's "owie", needs a band-aid (because we all know band-aids make everything better).

It went on for a while before it dawned on me that she was complaining a little too much - too often about sore knees (or occasionally other joints) for me to ignore.

The Mom radar went off - there was something wrong with my girl.... 2 1/2 is way too young to be suffering from chronic joint pain of any kind. I made an appointment to have her, and her sore knees seen.

And in the days that passed before her appointment I had plenty of time to kick myself for letting it go on so long before cluing in. Would I have waited so long if she were a firstborn? Would I have have been more attentive if our house weren't such a constantly-in-motion zoo?

I also had plenty of time for the worst-case scenarios to run rampant through my brain; what if it were juvenile arthritis? Or worse, some freaky weird from of cancer??

(why do we let those kinds of thoughts fester & take root? I'm not alone here, I don't think...)

So off to the pediatrician we went.

Where I tried to explain what I'd been noticing and insist that this happy, smiling chatty little girl was in some sort of pain often enough to have me worried.... honest!

(why do kids never have symptoms of their mysterious problems when you're actual in front of a doctor? Is that a strange twist of Murphy's law?)

But, after examining her, he DID see something wrong:

She's really bendy.

As in hyper-something something syndrome.... or what I remember we used to call "double-jointed"

Loose/soft connective tissue.... joints that easily over-extend and can make her susceptible to join pain - especially on very active days when she might hyper-extend something during play.

He showed me how her thumb & pinkie touch easily across the back of her hand, let me feel her rotating shoulder and how it shifts, showed me the elbow that bends a little too open.... kneecaps that "float all over the place".... etc.

That's it?? Not arthritis? No hideously awful prognosis or disease??

Bendy I can live with :)

Wheeeew!