A Very Good Day

Kirsten and I both had work off today for President's Day and, thanks to Kirsten's planning, we spent our first night away from Madeleine when she's been in the house. We felt like little kids last night waiting for the nurse to arrive as we'd pack a bag. We spent the night at a hotel in Downtown DC and then spent the day touring museums like tourists and had a great lunch. We only called the house three times to check on Madeleine which we thought was pretty great.

Perhaps even better than our day away, when we got home tonight, Madeleine amazed us with her continued progress. She continues to grow and is really starting to develop her core body strength. Its weird for us to gauge her progress as she's all over the map. In terms of following with eye sight and responding to stimuli, she's near or ahead of goals for her corrected age of nearly 10 months. She's wearing clothes in the 3-6 months category but her legs are so skinny that they easily fit into newborn clothing-- she's just tall and skinny (kinda like her dad used to be.) From a strength standpoint, she has a lot of work to do but she's making great strides. She continues to improve her ability to roll from back to front-- if she didn't have the trach, she'd roll over easily and even with the trach, she's usually able to roll anyway. From front to back, she's not close yet. During tummy time, she's able to raise her head with her neck muscles but she's not able to push up much with her arms. We're seeing some progress but that's the biggest area for improvement and we hope to post additional improvements soon. We meet weekly with a physical/occupational therapist and she provides great feedback and ideas that we can work on each week-- she comes tomorrow and I'm anxious to hear her thoughts on how we can continue to work on improving her arm/core body strength. The other area that I expect to start seeing improvement is in her leg strength. She's been growing so fast and lengthening out so much that her legs haven't really caught up yet. I expect we'll start to see her legs grow and once her core strength allows, we'll start putting her in "bouncy" seats that will help her develop these faster.

All in all, things are going great. Madeleine has tons of development ahead of her but so long as she remains healthy and Kirsten and I can stay patient, I think we're going to see some remarkable development. That's all for now-- have a good night.