Thursday, January 21, 2010

Shiny Happy Baby

Essie had her most recent neonatologist appointment a couple of days ago. I went into this one stressed out because the last visit brought lots of head-shaking and stern words about Essie's lack of upper body strength.

At that time she'd been not getting enough tummy time, and not cooperating when having it. (Argh, the term 'tummy time' still gets me with its cutesy-ness, but whatever.) I wasn't expecting quite the level of negativity we got out of that one and it primed me to freak out about this visit. Leading up to it I was worrying about her development, wondering if the things she could do were enough to get a passing 'grade' or not.



And O, did this frustrate me. I don't tend to worry that much about what she's doing as a general rule. I quit checking the sites that tell you what babies should be accomplishing month by month because she was fairly normal-seeming and I didn't want to become a worrywart charting every single little thing. Also the preemie-to-adjusted age thing muddies the developmental waters anyhow and I knew it would be crazymaking.



So in the last couple of weeks I'd been getting more and more anxious about what they'd see in her development and even broke my rule and looked at a couple of sites; an action I immediately regretted. I started getting really angsty about things I thought she was behind on.

Then we went to the neonatologist appointment and everything was fine! They praised her up, said she had all the ingredients for crawling and just needed to put them together, said her prone posture was perfect and even put my mind to rest about her current refusal to eat solid foods. They did say to keep working on her torso strength, of course, and I suspect that will continue to be a weakness of hers but overall they were pleased with her and my stress levels about it went way, way down.



She's so close to crawling. And she wants to be moving, let me tell you. She can scoot on her butt a bit but it's slow going so far. She face-plants a lot in her experiments with getting on all fours, but doesn't cry over that kind of thing much because she's a tough little nut. I'm a bit taken aback by this speedy transition from immobile baby to almost-toddler, honestly. Nobody warned me how fast all this goes when it's your baby doing the changing. Sigh.

Her one-year birthday is approaching so quickly. I'm also amazed by that. Where is the time going?