I can't believe I missed it!

I can't believe I forgot to acknowledge the one-year anniversary of Adele's release from the NICU! August 11 (Monday) is the anniversary date, and we spent it at home because Adele had a fever and couldn't to to daycare. I'm kind of sad that I let the big day slip by unnoticed. But maybe that's a GOOD sign--we've obviously moved past those days and are too busy with fun stuff to think about the NICU.

It seems like only yesterday, and yet it seems like YEARS ago. How is that possible? Either way, I'm glad it's only a memory now.

Anyway, because it's appropriate...

Then:

The last night in the NICU crib!

Getting ready to go!

Riding home...getting closer!

Home sweet home, crib sweet crib.
So tiny--I forgot how she used to sleep short-wise in the crib!

Now:

I thought this outfit was super-cute!

What she looks like in her crib these days...

For cuteness' sake.

Standing like a big girl. We're in trouble, aren't we?

15-month stats

Adele had her 15-month well-baby check up yesterday and the stats are as follows:

Weight: 19 pounds, 8 ounces (5-10 percentile)
Length: 30 inches (25-50 percentile)
Head circ: 17.25 inches (25-50 percentile)
Weight to length: 10-25 percentile

She's still pretty small for a 15-month-old, but she's stayed on the curves she's always been on, and that's really what the docs are looking at. If she stays put, it looks as though she'll end up being tall and thin. The tall doesn't surprise me one bit! Of course, I always like to look at the chart using her adjusted age, so in that regard...

Weight: 10-25 percentile
Length: 75-90 percentile (not surprising)
Head: 50-70 percentile

The bottom line is that she's growing appropriately and is healthy! That's all anyone cares about. :)

The best news from the appointment is that we can now treat Adele like a "normal" baby! No one has used the phrase "caught up" yet, but most preemies don't technically catch up to their actual age until around 2. Dr. Murphy gave us the OK to stop Early Intervention (aside from the monthly feeding therapy appointment), and once Adele has finished up the frozen breastmilk, we're done with bottles and on to cups and cow's milk full-time! Also, once we finish up this last batch of Prevacid, we're dropping that from the regimen. Her language is fine, her gross and fine motor skills are fine, her growth is fine... Have I mentioned that she's fine? ;) The only special thing we have to continue is thickening her liquids. We reguarly give her unthickened cow's milk in a sippy cup, and she manages that perfectly, but she will still sputter on unthickened water. It's a minor annoyance, though, and one I can live with considering how few other precauctions we have to take.

Somewhat off-topic, I have to apologize for the lack of photos lately. I haven't been taking many (too busy chasing after a certain busy baby!), and the ones I HAVE taken haven't turned out too well. I will do my best to rectify that, though! And in the meantime, you can enjoy this short video of Adele and Daddy playing Adele's new favorite game, "Talk into the Can." This game is right up there with her other favorite games, "Bang on the Can" and "Throw All My Toys into the Can and Then Pull Them All Back Out Again." I swear, that $3 can of hot chocolate was the best money we ever spent.

One year adjusted!

Today Adele is one-year-old adjusted (15 months actual, as of yesterday!). She had her Early Intervention assessment today and scored right on for her adjusted age (which is all anyone cares about). She's right on track as far as doing what "normal" 12-month-olds should do! She says a few words, points, knows who Mommy and Daddy are, plays appropriately with toys, cruises well (and has even stood alone for a few seconds a couple of times), is great at feeding herself, etc. She's absolutely perfect those areas. In fact, there wasn't anything they told us we should be concerned about, which is great. We'll see how she does at the "official" screening in September (at Children's Mercy), but honestly, I'm totally not worried. She has a doc appt in town next week, and I'm hoping that with this assessment in hand, we can stop Early Intervention altogether. We might end up doing a program called Ages and Stages, which is a little less intensive and requires meetings only once every three months. I really look forward to not having these twice-monthly appointments!

We'll finish off what we're hoping is her last can of formula today, as we expect to transition her milk fully after next week's doc appt. In the meantime, we're giving her the non-expired breastmilk and that is going really well. She's been eating it exclusively at daycare for about two weeks, and I gave her an 8oz bottle today (I'm home with her since daycare is closed) and she ate it like a champ! Of course, we also plan to drop the bottle soon, but we might have to keep one or two a day until the breastmilk is gone. Still not sure how one goes about weaning off the bottle--if it's gradual or cold-turkey--but I don't have many concerns about it being too difficult. She's never been that attached to her bottles (and there were plenty of times when she could take or leave them!) so I hope we can just let them go and never look back! It's weird to think about suddenly NOT making bottles 3-4 times a day, and we'll have to figure out new ways to get our snuggle times in. I also worry about her getting enough regular milk in during the day, but I'm sure that will come with time. I am NOT worried about her getting enough calories, however, as the girl will eat ANYTHING. Any fruit, veggie, bean, grain, pasta, cheese, meat (well, all she's had is chicken, but she liked it) is a hit with her. Thank goodness for that!

So, I guess you could say things are going really well! I'll know more after next week's appointment, but again, I'm so not worried about anything that I'm sure it will all go fine!

In unrelated news, I am SO excited for the Olympics to start tonight! I have the DVR set to record the opening ceremonies in case we're busy with dinner or bedtime when everything starts. I need to get on NBC's website and check out the schedule so I don't miss anything major.

I guess that's about it from here!

Spilt Milk

Remember this?



Unfortunately, most of that milk is STILL in that freezer, and I've made the heartbreaking decision that it's time to dump it. Some of it is more than a year old, and 12 months is the longest the experts recommend keeping frozen milk. Sad times for sure. Here's what I'll be dumping once it all thaws.


I did a very rough calculation and figured there's about 400 oz, which equals about 66 six-ounce bottles or 15 days' worth. Ugh, ugh, ugh. And if wasting breastmilk isn't heartbreaking enough, I noticed the time on one of the bottles was 5:30 am--all that time and energy down the drain, too! The good thing is that considering I have about that much still in the freezer that hasn't expired, I'm on a mission to use it before it spoils!

Knock on Wood

I know I'm jinxing things by posting this, but last night marks three nights in a row that Adele has slept through the night. To my knowledge, that has never happened before! For the longest time, we were waking once or twice for a feeding. Then she just woke up on her own to eat. After we determined she was gaining fine and didn't need that nighttime bottle, she still would wake up, but we could get her back down with a snuggle in the rocking chair. However, for the past few months S and I got lazy and started bringing her to bed with us at the first sign of crying. Path of least resistance, I suppose. And that was fine for a while, until it became obvious that she preferred to sleep sideways and Steve and I were slowly forced to the very edges of our respective sides of the bed.

So, we'd decided we needed to take control of the situation. Neither of us are fans of "cry it out," and the times we did try it--out of desperation or frustration--were met with complete and utter failure. Adele pukes when she gets worked up, it seems. What we did do, however, is modify our evening/bedtime routine just enough to make it clear that it's time for sleeping--in one's own bed! She still may fuss a bit when you lay her down (we still rock her to sleep/drowsy, and that's not going to change anytime soon), but a few pats on the bottom and sneaking out usually does the trick. She may even fuss a bit once you leave, but I can tell when she's fussing in her sleep (or on her way to sleep) and when she's crying wide-awake. In the case of the latter, we go in and start over and that's usually enough. And overnight, the biggest change we've made is that we're no longer turning the volume up on the monitor speaker in our room. It's sort of cheating, I realize, but I know that if she's REALLY upset we'll hear her anyway (our house isn't that big and she's a loud girl), but we're also not waking up at the first peep she makes. So far, she's not made enough of a fuss to rouse us, and this morning she was still sound asleep at 6:00! (Yes, I know 6:00 seems awfully early, but I'll take an early morning after a night of solid sleep over a late morning after a night interrupted sleeep any day!)

One side effect I had not anticipated, though, was the fact that I'm more tired now than I was when she was waking up in the night. I don't quite get that. I think I'm still EXPECTING her to wake up at any moment, so I don't really get into that deep sleep that I used to. Hopefully, if this is a permanent trend, I'll relax enough to get a restful night's sleep.

And if I haven't yet ensured our failure by posting this, surely our upcoming weekend of travel will do the trick! Ah, but it will be worth it: We travel to beautiful Iowa, my home state, to celebrate my parents' 40th wedding anniversary! Surely a disruption is a small price to pay for such a lovely, happy occasion.

Ow.

Well, it was bound to happen eventually, I suppose: Adele suffered her first daycare bang-up on Friday. She was crawling after some of the bigger kids, who were running around, and there was a collision that resulted in Adele banging her chin on the floor and biting her tongue. She's got a nice scrape on the underside of her chin and a slice on the front of her tongue. Those two little baby teeth she has are razor-sharp! By the time I picked her up, she was doing okay--they'd given her some Tylenol--but the tongue looked terrible, and I could tell she wasn't her usual happy self. Now, a few days later, she's just fine and the gash is much improved. It looks more like a canker sore now. Thank goodness the tongue heals so quickly! The chin scrape looks worse than it did on Friday, as it's scabbed over a bit, but it doesn't seem to bother her at all.

Oddly, there was a bit of fun news that came out of her mouth injury. G-Ma (she and Papa were here visiting for the weekend) and I spent a lot of time peeking into Adele's mouth so we could gauge how well the injury was healing, and all that peeking resulted in spying the next tooth that's about to sprout! It's a top tooth--her top right, to be exact--and you can just barely see the tip starting to poke through. I'm happy to see it because A) it's been a long time (late March) since her last tooth came in and I was starting to wonder when she'd get more and B) it explains why she's been SO FUSSY all week. I suspected teeth, but without visual proof it was mostly just me HOPING that was the cause of her fussiness.

In other news, we've begun the transition from bottle to cup and from formula to milk. I'm hoping that at her 15-month-actual/1-year-adjusted check-up next month we'll get the OK to drop formula and just stick with milk. We're still mixing her formula to 24 calories, but I hope we won't have to fortify her milk. We'll just have to see how much she weighs, I guess! She's eating well enough, I think, and she certainly feels heavy enough! I do admit to being nervous about trying to get a minimum of 16 oz milk in her via cup only. Yikes. Not sure how that will work, but I guess we'll get there eventually! Any tips from other moms out there?

Whoooosh

That is the sound of Summer 2008 whizzing past me. How did it get to be JULY already?? Sheesh.

It's been a fun summer, though. Last year I didn't get outside except to walk from home to car to work to car to home to car to hospital. Rinse. Repeat. Eight hundred times. I tanned with Adele under the bilirubin lights. ;) This summer is a VAST improvement, let me tell you. And in looking for the appropriate "this time last year" photo, I see that LAST July 1 we were celebrating coming off all oxygen! Oh, God bless the small victories. I still can't believe how small she looks there (compared to my giant man-hand), and I remember thinking at the time how BIG she was. Memories...

Last weekend I met a couple Mom-friends and their kids at the Deanna Rose Children's Farmstead in OP, KS. It is SUCH a cool place, and the best part is it's FREE. You can pay for extras, such as pony rides, hay-rack rides, milk to feed the baby goats (awww), but the main "park" is free admission. Sweet! It's sort of a glorified petting zoo meets nature park meets living history center (sans dorky reenactors).

Plenty of places to roam and it never got too crowded or jumbled with people (and it seemed like there were plenty of people there). Nice playgrounds spread out over the grounds, and plenty of things to keep school-age kids entertained. All our kids were too young for much hands-on activity, aside from petting the gigantic dairy cow, but it's still a fun way to spend a few hours. And I know as Adele gets older she'll really enjoy the exhibits. If you're a gardener/plant fan, the grounds are beautifully kept and there are different gardening areas to enjoy (kitchen garden with herbs and vegetables, all kinds of flowers and plants, a butterfly garden and wooded nature trail and bird-watching area). Another thing I noticed, and appreciated, because apparently I am an old lady now, was the wealth of seating areas. Benches and low rock walls were abundant, and there were nice wooden bench swings and things to rest on. It was a totally enjoyable day! AND I was happy to get out and spend some time with some other moms and kids. Good times! (P.S. Check out the photo captions at the end of the blog.)

After a few hours there, there was only one thing left to do: GO SHOE SHOPPING! Right? Right. I'm attending my dear friend Michelle's wedding in August, and I NEEDED new shoes. (New dress requires new shoes, people!) DSW was having a sale, and since there was a store just up the road... Joanne joined me and gave me great advice, and I managed to find the perfect pair! All-in-all a successful Saturday, I must say.

This weekend promises to be fantasic as well, and thankfully it's a short work-week too! Anyway, my dear friend Lindi and her family (which includes 3-year-old Carina and soon-to-be-1-year-old Izzy) will be in town!!!! The last time they were in the state was back in December. We were going to get the babies together, but illness conspired against us and we were forced to cancel. Lindi and I were pregnant at the same time, so we've been looking forward to getting "our girls" together for the past year. Looks like we'll FINALLY get to do so!

We're going to meet in Kansas City, at her cousin's house, which will allow me to finally meet them (the cousin and his wife and their kids). Brian and Jen and I started emailing shortly after Adele was born. You see, their oldest, Lucas, was a preemie too (he's 4 now!), and they lent their prayers and support when we were going through those tough times. I'm really looking forward to meeting them, and meeting their full-term, take home baby, Caleb! No one appreciates a full term baby more than a preemie parent, that's for sure!

I hope your summers are being enjoyed to the fullest!

Photos: 1. Maggie, Adele and Sam (don't mind the Moms behind the curtain!) 2. Joanne (ex-coworker) and Maggie 3. The kitchen/practical gardens. It was hard to resist eating some of those fresh goodies!! 4. Adele and Sam (Adele looks pretty bored here!) 5. An iconic piece of prairie landscape: The Windmill. This one was framed by a beautiful summer sky!