Bigger and better adventures

Earlier this month I volunteered to help out on the National Premmie Foundation’s stand at the Pregnancy, Babies and Children’s Expo when it was running in Perth.  It was great to meet some premmie mums from interstate, as well as catch up with local mums.

Since then I was thinking more about what I could possibly do to help other parents of premature babies in Perth.  I’m not really an organiser of events or other people, as I prefer to take a “behind the scenes” approach.  So I thought about what had worked for me, when I was looking for support.

In a nutshell, what I did at the time was turn to the internet.  It took me several months before I found what I was looking for (and it turned out to be L’il Aussie Prems!) so I decided that maybe I could make that journey shorter for someone else by having a local site.  My hope is that if anyone goes searching on the internet for premature babies and includes the word Perth, hopefully they’ll find me - and I can provide links to LAP, other national support sites, and any local groups in Perth too.  I will also post information that I think is interesting and relevant to premmie parents.  In the longer term I hope to be involved in more than just providing information, but I figure this is a good start.

So here is my site:  www.preminperth.net

Of course it also gives me another opportunity to show off my amazing little daughter.  And yes it does owe a lot to this site… once again I would like to say thank you to Jules for providing this great resource - forum, blog space and all - and being an inspiration!

Time flies when you’re having fun, and Talia certainly seems to be enjoying herself!

In the past month her crawling has reached warp speed and her cruising is also very good. She pulls herself up on just about everything and anything and will walk while holding on with one hand (although she prefers it with two).

She finally realised it was quicker to go down the step backwards than to sit at the top and call for help, and as a result is now able to move all around the house. She’s also applied the going down backwards knowledge to new steps in other locations, which is good, but isn’t too sure what to do when there is more than one step, which is all we have at home.

A big achievement for the last month has been the development of pointing and waving. Her pointy finger is not the most accurate, but it’s getting better, and the waving is a bit sporadic too - but it’s still pretty exciting for us!

We’ve just started the transition to cow’s milk, and that has gone very well. When I first tried giving it to her several months ago she didn’t seem to like it at all, but now she’s very happy to drink it straight from the fridge, and I’m only making up formula first thing in the morning and last bottle of the day (so probably less than 200ml in total) to give her the benefit of the various vitamins etc that are part of the formula.

As far as eating goes, we haven’t really made any great progress. Talia will occasionally eat a small amount of food from a spoon, and sometimes put the spoon in her mouth by herself, but not often. I’ve given her a small amount of food and a spoon and left her to play with it and she hasn’t wanted to actually eat any of it at all. She still loves to eat beef sausage, peas, corn kernels, and beans, plus a bit of pasta and rice. She’s OK with toast for breakfast and will usually eat bread spread with avocado or pate. I had been buying a range of baby snack foods because I was tired of making things she wouldn’t eat, and for a while she was happy with Heinz muesli bars and cheesey breadsticks, but has now abandoned them too. So I’m back to doing a bit of baking and she is currently happy to eat some biscuits and slices I’ve made. Her weight is still around the 10th percentile or just above it, so I’m not at all worried about it, but I wish she would eat a few more “normal baby foods” like fruit or yogurt, neither of which we’ve had success with.

Talia still doesn’t have any real words, but has a fantastic range of babble sounds (used indiscriminately) and will sometimes copy sounds. I took her into a pet shop and showed her some fish in an aquarium, and when I said “fish”, she said “vish”, which was cute. She still makes a noise which could be interpreted as “cat” when she sees our cat, but she uses the same sound at other times when the cat is absent, so I’m not convinced. She hasn’t picked up any more Auslan signs either, and for a while even stopped using the one sign she had started to use (”milk” which she uses to mean “I want it, give it to me”).

In terms of play, she’s discovered the joy of going up and down the slide. She can almost put in a puzzle piece. Of course she still loves her books, especially the ones with flaps. She gets quite excited by new things, or seeing people she hasn’t seen for a bit, and squeals with excitement. She starts a lot of games of peekaboo and can be kept amused for ages if you have the stamina to keep playing!

We have fully transitioned to one sleep per day. Unfortunately it’s not particularly long - an hour or an hour and a half if I’m lucky. But it seems to be enough to get her through the rest of the day, and if she is too tired then we just put her to bed by 7pm instead of the usual 7:30pm. For a while she was getting very upset about going to bed and crying so much she threw up, but now I put her in sitting down and it seems to be better - she can still get upset sometimes but it’s harder to throw up.

She can also be quite difficult when I’m trying to change her nappy or get her dressed/undressed, but I’ve managed to stop it getting out of hand. I have a change table toy which she doesn’t play with elsewhere, and that is often enough to distract her. I also try to change her clothes while she’s standing up, as that seems to be less distressing to her.

And just a few stats: 9.03 kg; 72.0cm long; head circumference of 47cm … and 11 teeth

This time last year my friends’ son Alexander turned one year old, and we went to his party. It was the first time we had taken Talia anywhere further than a few blocks from our house since she came home from hospital six weeks earlier. It was a big event for us emotionally as new parents of a prem, as we were still very concerned about her contracting even a cold after she was diagnosed with chronic lung disease as a result of spending 11 weeks on CPAP, and we were not sure how we would cope with seeing lots of big babies.

In the end it was fine, Talia was thrilled to make her first acquaintance with balloons (which she has loved to bits ever since) and I ate the contents of her lolly bag (tut tut mummy!)

Fast forward 12 months to today and we were back at Alexander’s house for his second birthday.  The little kids from last year were positively enormous this year, but Talia has grown quite a lot too.  She scoffed three pieces of fairy bread, two pieces of sushi and a range of other food, crawled around the place, popped a couple of balloons and greatly enjoyed trying out some of Alexander’s many toys.

Then after a power nap in the car on the way home, she spent part of the afternoon rearranging the sandpit.

Life is good.

Daddyfeatures and I are natural born couch potatoes. We were the kids who had no natural co-ordination and always got picked last for primary school sporting teams. In short, Nerds ‘R Us.

As a result of our own miserable playground experiences, we’d really like Talia to be a life-be-in-it, have-a-go sort of child. Given her genetic inheritance and her prematurity, we figure it will take a bit of effort on our part to help her gain the confidence and the skills that we seemed to miss out on. So we’ve started by giving her experiences in the playground beyond what she might get if we worried too much.

Fortunately for us, she loves it! The swing is a daily delight and she shrieks with happiness as we push her until the chains of the swing are flying out almost horizontally. (I give thanks to the person who invented the bucket swing for toddlers!)

The slide was tolerated and she didn’t seem to mind sitting at a height almost 5 feet above the ground and sliding down on her bottom while holding my fingers. Then a couple of days ago I decided it might be interesting for her to go down on her tummy, feet first. A stroke of genius, even if I do say so myself. She was exhilarated and couldn’t wait to do it over and over - and then she climbed back up the face of the slide, for the first time ever - and not only that, but she managed to clamber all the way to the very top, twice!

As you can imagine, she was very pleased with herself, almost as proud as I was!

At this rate it will be no time before she’ll be in the front carriage of the roller coaster at the show with her eyes open and both arms in the air. If my hair isn’t grey by then no doubt it will be soon after!