September
2008
14 months0
Miss Dorrie will be 14 months old tomorrow. I notice I haven’t put up any pictures for a couple months; I’ll try to rectify that. But as my mom said, pictures of a baby in her diaper all tend to look kind of the same. It’s the clothes that help you differentiate between when they were taken. Fortunately, we’re moving back in to the time of year where having her dressed isn’t going to make her miserable. This is the ONLY good thing about the approach of winter, because otherwise I am absolutely terrified and will be until next April.
Though still far behind where she ought to be at 10.5 months, her motor skills are showing improvement: now, instead of allowing toys to fall immediately from her fingers, she will instead fling them up at her face and smack herself in the nose. Since this fails to achieve her desired goal (toy in the mouth), she will repeat the process, banging her nose over and over again until she finally drops the toy. She’s stubborn.
She’s still an amazingly happy baby, sometimes even when she hasn’t had enough sleep, and always when she has. She laughs and smiles and would, I am sure, be shrieking happily if she didn’t have that trach in to block her voice. Unfortunately we only ever get to hear her voice when she’s upset — mostly when we change the trach, but also when she’s just so annoyed that she can shove some air up past the cuff. When you’re sitting on the floor with her, even with all the noise in the room from the O2 concentrator and the vent, you can hear her if she starts to cry. It’s a sort of crackly noise.
Her head control is still an area of big difficulty. The tubes are really keeping her back; her legs and lower abdomen are getting very strong. On her tummy, she can lift her legs way up into the air, getting them and her pelvis clear of the floor. But because of the tubes she likes to put her arm straight out to the side, so she doesn’t think about using it to help push her head up.
Friday she has her follow up visit with the cardiologist. I’m hoping everything looks normal again and maybe we can get rid of a med. Her O2 saturation has been pretty stable, so if that’s any indication, the news ought to be okay.