God is good

Everyone told me things with a preemie start to improve around the age of two. Seeing where we were both physically and mentally I was not sold on that. As of now I can say it has been 100% true for our baby girl.

So many things are starting to fall into place both physically and mentally and problems that have caused more stress than one can imagine are starting to get answers. Knowing her history of growing and then plateauing for many months I fear saying this but we are making progress in all areas of her life and we could not be more grateful/proud of our beautiful baby girl. I wish I could say Jason and I are the reason she made such huge gains but it was all her. Way to go!

Today Kaylie received her annual review for Early Childhood intervention or ECI as I normally refer to it. We started using them when Kaylie was 5 months/2 months corrected and have been so grateful for them. They re-evaluated her today and the results were amazing.

They test 5 different areas. Here are the areas and her scores. I will show what she scored at 16 months and what she scored at today-28 months. Keep in mind they no longer correct for prematurity but it should always be kept in the back of your mind when looking at the scores because if they did some of the scores would actually be age appropriate. Current score is in bold.

FYI: If you correct the 16 mth one she would have been 13 mths
If you correct the 28 mth she would now be 25 months.

Cognitive works on gaining skills and knowledge. We were blown away by the new results. I watched her match color to color and size to size. I knew she could do picture to picture but the other two shocked me. They also gave her several objects and asked her a question..."What do you use on your hair?" She reached over and grabbed the brush. Impressive!!!

She went from being down 4 months to catching up plus adding several more months of additional skills to get her to a 31 month old. Can you tell we are proud!

- 16 mths: scored as a 12 mths old
- 28 mths: scored as a 31 mth old

Communication looks at how the express themselves and understand. We figured this would be low. Her feeding disorder actually hurts these scores.

- 16 mths: scored as 10 mth old
- 28 mths: scored as a 21 mth old

Social Emotional works on the child's interactions with others.
- 16 mths: scored as a 16 mth old
- 28 mths: scored as a 27 mth old (slightly down but still up for corrected age)

Physical works with use of hands and movements. She finally imitated drawing a circle. This was a first. She really struggles to hold a crayon so I was pleased to see this. Our next step is to work on strength of her drawings. What I mean is trying to get her to push down harder so you can see what she is doing. Right now she doesn't have enough hand strength to do that.

- 16 mths: scored as a 14 mth old
- 28 mths: scored as a 27 mth old - made up a little bit of ground

The other category is adaptive/self care. The scores on these are low but they said the test they use is not the best for evaluating this area so we did not need to take it to seriously.

I know all of this has been confusing but it basically shows how well Kaylie is doing with all of her therapy sessions. We think me being at home, all the therapy she has gotten, and having the proper nourishment have helped as well.

Other stuff:
On Tuesday we had another upper endoscopy to see if things had cleared up since her one in June. I figured if he did not see anything the first time we would be good. Prelim results look awesome. Hopefully we will know more tomorrow. I am not thinking it will be anything other than she looks great.