My bones grow
One day my mother let me hold my baby brother. “Why is he so much softer
than I am?” I asked.
My mother said, “One reason he feels softer is that his bones aren’t as
hard as yours are. When babies are born, they have very few hard bones.
Their skeletons are mostly cartilage. But bone cells work all the time,
and so bones get bigger and harder. Your bones are bigger and harder
than the baby’s, and my bones are bigger and harder than yours. Your
bones will grow and get harder and harder until you are about twenty
years old.
Once the doctor took an X ray of my wrist. The doctor wanted to see how
my bones were growing. I asked how a picture of my wrist could show what
was happening to all the bones in my body.
The doctor said, “Your wrist has eight bones in it. But they do not get
there all at once. Some children’s wrist bones gi’ow faster or slower
than the wrist bones of
other children. But the wrist bones grow in the same step-by-step way in
all healthy children. If your wrist bones look right on the X ray, then,
most likely, the rest of your bones are also gi’owing the way they
should.”
