Developmental Delay?

So today was baby girls major Developmental appointment.  This was one of the MOST important appointments we were excited about, since discharging from the hospital 3 months ago.  This appointment was the tell all.. to see how baby girl is growing and developing after being a micro preemie.

a micropreemie or micro preemie is defined as a baby that is under 1 3/4 pounds (between 700-800 grams) and is generally born before 26 weeks gestation, but most people prefer to loosen this term up to include any baby under 3 pounds (1500 grams) or under 29 weeks gestation.

Our baby girl was born 4 months early, making her gestational age only 24 weeks.  At a small 1 pound 8 oz., bleeding in her brain, holes in her heart, and on the ventilator… she had a rough start at life.  God gave those sweet nurses the love and strength they needed to use to fight with her/for her to save her precious life.

Once we discharged from the hospital when she was 4 months old, it was crazy how small and fragile she seemed at just 7 pounds.

These past 3 months at home I have worked with a team of people (from doctors, to therapist, to specialist) to give me ways I could help improve her strength/endurance/mobility and overall loosen her stiff muscles.  Is it a LOT more work than a regular/healthy newborn?  Yes! But is it so worth it? Yes!

So now that you have a little back story, the appointment today was testing her Gross motor skills(movement and coordination with legs, arms, and other large parts of the body), Visual Reception (being able to interpret the environment around you by processing information contained in visible light), Fine motor (the small muscles and how they coordinate together), Receptive language (the ability to understand information), and Expressive language (the ability to speak certain words to form a language). They used her adjusted age (making her only 4 months old at this test) to do this exam, and her results are amazing!

She actually met her goals and surpassed them by one month on 3/5 categories! They gave me some more ideas on what to work on, when to start foods, and a lot of REALLY helpful handouts that I could see and some websites to utilize as well.

Thank you to for all of your amazing prayers for baby girl, and please continue them as we have a lot of developmental progress going to be happening in these next few months!

©2016 Sheridan Johnson @Journey with the Johnsons. All Rights Reserved.