The questions you forget to ask at the check-up

Every parent has done this.

You spend three weeks noticing things. Some of them worry you slightly. Some of them are just curious. You think, more than once, I'll ask at the next appointment.

Then you're in the room. The baby is crying, or asleep, or trying to get off the table. You're holding a coat, a bag and a nappy. Someone asks you a question you weren't expecting. Ten minutes later you're in the car park, and the thing you actually wanted to say arrives in your head fully formed, about four minutes too late.

It isn't a memory problem

It's a format problem.

The observations happen over weeks, in the middle of ordinary life, usually while your hands are full. The appointment happens once, in a compressed window, while you are managing a small person who does not want to be there. Nothing about the first situation is designed to survive into the second.

And the questions themselves are slippery. They rarely arrive as questions. They arrive as a vague sense that something is a bit different this month — which is much harder to hold onto than a sentence.

The one that catches everyone

There's a specific question that appears at almost every visit, in some form: when did that start?

It sounds simple. It is not. Without something written down, the honest answer is usually "a while ago — a few weeks? maybe longer?" — and that answer is much less useful to the person asking it than a date would be.

"I said 'about a month'. It turned out to be nearly three. I only realised later, looking at photos."

This is the single most valuable thing a parent can bring into a check-up, and it costs nothing: not an opinion about what's happening, just when you first noticed it.

What's worth writing down between visits

None of this is about diagnosing anything, or arriving with a theory. It's the opposite — it's arriving with clean information so the person who is qualified to interpret it has something real to work with.

• Anything new, and the date you first noticed it
• Anything that stopped, and roughly when
• Sleep and feeding as they actually are this month, not as they were
• Questions in the exact words they arrived in, even if they sound silly written down
• What you were told last time, so you can say whether it changed

That last one gets forgotten constantly. A check-up is a conversation with gaps of months in it, and you are the only person carrying the thread between them.

Two minutes in the waiting room

If you write nothing between visits, there is still a version of this that works: read back through your own notes, photos or messages while you're waiting, and put three lines in your phone.

Three lines is enough. It is the difference between "he's been a bit off" and "since around the 12th, and it got worse after the weekend."

Nobody expects you to arrive organised. But the ten minutes go faster than you think, and everything you didn't manage to say waits another three months for its turn.