Welcome y’all to my new and improved website! I’d love for this blog to grow with our family, and this seemed like the logical next step! Thanks for hanging with us so far and hopefully there will be more exciting things to come as we all grow together.
I figured it was also time for a general life update on our family and Regan. Regan is now 11 months and it completely blows my mind that she’ll be a year old in only a few weeks. I’ve had a lot of “this time last year” flashbacks over the past few weeks, and “this time last year”, I was blissfully unaware that I was only weeks away from having a baby. I had not a single thing packed and the nursery wasn’t quite done and I thought I had plenty of time to spare. Regan started teaching me things from the very beginning!
Regan is working very hard on achieving her next set of milestones. We hit a bit of a plateau after she breezed through her months following surgery. She quickly started rolling over, had complete head control, and started babbling not long after. Her biggest focus over the past weeks and months has been sitting.
One of the most common things I heard in my conversations with other moms who have children with Down syndrome was ‘you’ll be blown away by some things your child does, and you’ll have real struggles with some things.’ That has turned out to be so accurate. So we celebrate big at every milestone and continue to work hard to achieve the others. Sitting has been tough, and it’s led to other delays. Most therapists have told us that until she can sit confidently on her own, her fine motor skills will follow a similar delay. In part because she seemed to be having a hard time, we have decided to pursue outpatient therapy. With outpatient therapy, we go to a therapy center and she sees an occupational therapist and a physical therapist each week. It’s a little more intense than the Early Intervention therapies and I think it’s the right fit for us right now. Regan seems to be improving, and I’m SO proud to share we officially have a sitter! She can hold a seated position for probably 20-30 minutes, but she can’t yet transition in and out of a seated position on her own. She is desperately trying to crawl and has started to pull her knees under her! All progress in this house is slow and steady and she is one determined little girl.
Under the “blown away” category, we have an amazing eater. Regan still has no teeth, so we are enjoying her gummy smiles and feed her anything that can be mashed. She eats pretty much anything we give her, including avocado, chili, soft meats, soft veggies and of course tons of baby food combinations. She hasn’t grasped self-feeding yet, but we are told that will come with the development of her fine motor skills, which will follow the development of her sitting. The human development timeline is truly amazing, and I’m happy I’ve been given the gift of seeing it in slow motion.
Regan has had a series of hearing tests since she was born. She has always failed some portion of these tests. There are two tests done – one is more sensitive than the other. She has twice passed the “more important” (the doctors’ words) test. It seems this one is a larger indicator of true hearing loss, not caused by external factors (such as fluid in the ear). With that said, she’s failed the more sensitive test twice, and they think she has fluid build-up in her ear. So we are headed to the ENT in a couple weeks to see what they have to say about that.
I think I mentioned this before, but we received a clean bill of health from the cardiologist and we don’t go back to see her again until MARCH!
We are thankful for every healthy day we have here, and we keep working on her developmental milestones progress!
