Today is my due date!!
A lot has changed in our lives in the last year. It is crazy to think that our almost two
month old should have been born today.
He acts like a newborn, and for a while he will be on the “corrected age”
scale of development. So if a baby was
supposed to sit at five months, he will sit up five months from now. He should catch up sometime before he turns
two.
He is strong and likes to eat. He still is super skinny but has been putting
on weight like a champ. He has had
weekly weight checks because he really didn’t gain much of anything for a
while. When he was discharged, he was 25
days old but only one ounce higher than his birth weight. (They want them to regain their birth weight
10-14 days after birth.) He has since
started gaining about an ounce a day, which is the top side of what they hope
for. His last weight check on Friday was
5 pounds 15 ounces! So we have an almost
6 pounder. My understanding is that he
should be about what his birth weight would have been, so he is still really
small. On the premature boy growth
chart, he is only in the 5th percentile. So he has a ways to go. But he is looking less like the saggy baggy
elephant and more like a little newborn baby every day.
Since leaving the
NICU, there were a few things I didn’t necessarily foresee that has been a
unique trial in our lives. Of course
there are the (what feels like) constant doctors’ appointments that most
newborns don’t have. He was on antibiotics
that can cause harm to his hearing so we have a special hearing test with a
pediatric audiologist. (He passed with
flying colors!) Extra weight checks…
Things like that. But the biggest
dilemma for us has been his weak immune system.
He has not gotten sick, but we are VERY careful about germs. No public appearances at all for at least two
months. So no grocery shopping, diaper
runs, library programs, zoo trips… We
are a little stir crazy. We also change
our clothes as soon as we get home from church before we touch him. (One of us has to stay home every Sunday from
church to be with him.)
Our ward is also a unique group of individuals so there are
only something like 10 kids in the entire primary. So friend-making for Haley is going a bit
slow. We are super excited for
Kindergarten to start for her so she can make some friends. She has also been learning to read. She gets bored quickly and starts to get busy
doing other things, but is really good at reading when she takes the time to
look at the page! She is doing the book How
to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It is amazing how much she can do after only
going through something like the first 25 lessons.
Alaina is flirting with potty training. I am not.
I help her when I can but I am not quite ready to whole-heartedly commit
to it. She likes to wear panties but has
a few accidents every day. She is
talking like a maniac with a vocabulary I can’t begin to count! She has a great sense of humor too. It doesn’t take much for her to learn new
words and uses them correctly. She
conjugates verbs and uses words like “me”, “you”, and “I” properly.
Benjamin started his residency on June 17th. He did two weeks in the podiatry clinic then
started his first rotation of residency.
He has learned a lot in vascular surgery and will continue there through
the month of July. He will start anesthesia
and general surgery in august. We got
the “Pass of all Passes” which gets us into a lot of things including water parks
and he has loved that. He takes the
girls often and I got to go once when my mom was here to watch Adam. Benjamin got to go down a “big scary” slide
as Alaina calls it and we watched. It
was super intense. He went down face
first on a mat and went so fast he caught air twice. He looked like he enjoyed it but definitely
had big eyes! His kind of fun. Haley likes to remind me that if I tried to
go on that slide, I would probably cry. Which
is completely true.
We have finally begun to settle down in our new townhome, especially
thanks to my mom for coming to visit and help us unpack. Routines are starting to set in, which is
nice because we haven’t had a really great routine in over a year, or so it
seems.
I have had many thoughts running through my mind that I wish
to write down, so I hope to post them soon.
Thank you so much for the many prayers and fasts on our behalf. We have felt the benefits of those prayers.
So that is our family update for now. The girls adore our new addition, as do
Benjamin and I. We are so blessed to
have the family we do.
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