Tot Update

Thought I'd give a quick update on Little Miss J. I haven't written in her baby book in a while, and I have to put these notes somewhere before I forget.

We're on Week 3 of the new teacher at the same daycare. Things seem to be going better with the bottles and feeding diary. For the past few weeks, Julia has been sleeping through the night. I think it has to do with daycare doing better with the bottles, so she doesn't need to wake up to eat anymore. Whatever the case, it's nice to have her sleeping through the night most nights.

Bottle aversion seems to be lessening. She's not screaming when the bottle's in her presence. She still doesn't hold her bottle, but she's getting better about willingly opening her mouth for it if it's sitting in front of her for 5-15 minutes. This is progress! It used to be a complete fight, or we'd feed her when she was asleep. Most days she's taking 16 oz or more. Wahoo!

Cup is waning. Daycare has been much better about the bottle, so she's not drinking as much from the cup. The therapist doesn't want us to push the cup til her liquids got up. Her liquids seem to be pretty good now, but the dilemma is that Julia isn't fond of milky liquids from the cup. So right now there's juice in the cup instead of milk or formula.

Solids aren't going so hot either. She's likely filling up on formula instead. I've started to put whole milk in her bottle. Hopefully thinning out the concentration will help her become more interested in solids.

As of last week, she weighed 19 lbs, 12 ounces. She weighed 19 lbs, 7 ounces a month before that. She's gaining, albeit slowly. She had a big gain between 12 months and 13.5 months - over a pound! She was in the 9th percentile last week. Now that she's turning 15 months this week, she's going to slide down to probably 5th or so.

Next week we have an ENT appointment for her. She passed her hearing test last week, but there was fluid in her ears which made her score lower than they would like on a couple of the tests. Not quite an ear infection right now (though she's had her share of those). We're thinking we're going to have to get tubes in her ears. We definitely don't want her ear problems to be the reason she's not talking much. Plus, we want to curb the ear infections if we can.

It's hard to tell definitively, but we seem to be hearing more sounds from Julia. Like today she said the "p" sound - she kinda said "up" after we said it ten times.

Every kid is so different. Julia's way ahead on her gross motor skills with her twirling around and getting good at trying to put on her shoes. She's on target cognitively. Lagging a bit in speech and lagging a ton in eating.

Never would have thought MY kid would be ahead in motor skills and behind in eating. I'm the person who gashed up her legs because she couldn't manage walking down 2 lousy steps, and I have a PhD in eating. Go figure.