Development of a Premie

I feel like I have to preface this post. I'm more about posting pics for family to see. I think pics are worth 100 words and I know I look at blogs mostly for the pics. But I wanted to keep a record of this little girl's development and what we have learned about premies.

Of course being premature (10 weeks) will cause E to have some delay in her development. It is hard to know what 'normal' is when all kids grow and learn at different speeds. Plus, being first time parents we were curious to see how E was doing. A few weeks ago we had a couple therapists come to our house to analyse E's development (a fairly normal practice for premies). We had the assessment done when she was just 9 months (being almost 7 in her adjusted gestational age). They analyse the babies in 5 different areas. Here were E's scores:

Cognitive-9 months

Communication-8 months

Social-Emotional-10 months

Physical-7 months

Adaptive Behavior-10 months

Let's just say she is on track! They say it can take up to 2 years for a premie to catch up. E is a little behind in her physical and communication skills but I feel like she's catching up quickly (plus she is on with her gestational age so no need to worry). I mean, she is pretty small for her age so learning how to do all that crawling stuff is hard work. We had to laugh at her social-emotional and adaptive behavior scores (as you notice, she is advanced in those) because if you are around E you know that is true. She is very aware of her surroundings, her mom, other kids, etc. She also is an awesome eater, preferring to have most finger foods and not mushed up and spoon fed. She is great and it has been fun to watch the development happen!

Here is E's latest trick, the army crawl.

And another for fun. E gets the sleepy-sillies really bad when she is up late or right before naps. This night she didn't want to go to sleep so was up hanging out with mom and dad way past her bed time. But who couldn't love this?