Norah's Report Card

Today, Norah and I went to the neonatal development followup program at Children Hospital of Wisconsin. Our appointment lasted 2 1/2 hours, that's a long time for my baby girl. She weighed in a 14lbs 5oz, 10%, she's still tiny but 10% is better than the 5% that she used to be! She just had a growth spurt, she's now 26 3/4in, that's 70th percentile. She'll be tall like her mommy and daddy. Her head circumference meausured 42cm, she's down to the 50th percentile. I guess I never thought of Norah having an 'average' head, but yeah Norah! After all the measuring was finished, we had playtime with the therapist. We met with an occupational, physical and speech therapists. Norah was getting pretty tired since this was her usually time to nap, but she did her best to show off her skills. She 'talked' to all the girls and made them all fall in love with her. They were trying hard to get her to pass a block from one hand to another, she refused. That was until they put it down and she picked it up herself and started passing it between hands on her own. Silly girl, just doing things the way she wants to do it and in her own time. The big bummer is that she refused to roll over and didn't want to push up at all while she was on her tummy. These are two things she does daily and we had been working on with PT for the last month. Oh well, she can do them and that's what is most important.

Here are her scores: her cognitive skills were at 7 months, her fine motor and gross motor skills were both at 6 months, her receptive language (talking) 7 months, and her expressive language is at 5 months. Her core muscles are still weak. Dr. Bear calls her her buddah baby and said her expressive language will come one she has better control with her core muscle. That she needs to hold herself upright then she can practives her mama and dada more. They told us to keep spending lots of time with tummy time, and spend time sitting up and playing with things out in front of her. These are things that we already do. Once we were done with the therapist and Dr. Bear, we were off for a hearing test. Norah passed! Yeah for another thing that Norah won't have to have done again unless she shows any problems in the future. We were told the same thing last month when she passed her vision exam. We'll keep working with Birth to 3, but we made it out of the appointment without being referred to anyone else.

I think Norah is dong so well, she hanging right in there trying to keep up with her motor skills. I'm just so happy she's doing so well after such a tough start.