Well Ronan still isn’t walking. He is now 20 months old (17 months corrected)! We have been attending physio since he was 6 months old and it has been so helpful with reaching his milestones. His fine motor skills are just great and he has never had a problem with those, just when the body is involved that is when the slowness signs show.
Knowing that Ronan was born premature and may have milestone delay was one thing but to be told by our paed that he needed physio actually really upset me and made me feel like a failure. He was born early because of my body and now he faced these challenges. When you have a premature baby you have many feelings of guilt and it takes quite a while to get over these feelings so when we had to go to physio they all flooded back but not in the same sense. It was more a matter of feeling like i had failed him more than feeling guilty like i did when he was born.
At the time i thought that i was a bad mum and that i must be doing something wrong or not enough to help encourage him to reach his goals. It took a while for me to stop checking up on the progress of other babies around his corrected age as i learnt to realise that Ronan was going to do things in his own time. It took him till 8 months old (real age) to roll, 13 months (real age) to actually sit on his bottom, 14 months (real age) to crawl and he has been walking along furniture for many many months now. These days i take the light approach with how i deal with his setbacks and at times make light remarks that someone else’s baby will walk before Ronan. This is a much easier way to cope with other babies overtaking Ronan than getting upset and feeling like we are living with this everyday. Even though we are it is not a burden so why make it one is my theory.
A few days ago he started to walk forward. It had taken a long time to get him to walk forward as he was so used to walking sideways (which he did with furniture). He is starting to get his balance alot better now and in just 2 days he can almost walk just holding onto me with 1 hand. His balance is getting better everyday as he will be standing holding onto the lounge then will bend down to pick something up. I told his MCHN about this and she said that by the time he does decide to walk he will have fantastic balance and won’t be tripping over everything.
He now has a new trick that he likes to do called “walking on knees”. Ronan has always done his own thing and always finds strange ways to do them. For a long time he would scoot around on his back and slide across the room. He is that fast now that the back of his hair is always fluffy. It used to smell like burnt carpet but since he has been crawling it isn’t so strong anymore. No matter how much i wash his hair that smell is still there.
Whilst he has always been slow in the gross motor skills area we are grateful that he is a very smart cookie. He amazes us everyday with what he does and he is now understanding us when we tell him to go and do something. I know that he will walk one day but as always it will be within HIS time frame no one else’s.
It will certainly be strange the day he starts to walk and i just know we will be beside ourselves because it will be a matter of running after him from then.
He’s doing fabulously. And I’ve known perfectly healthy full term children who have decided to hold off on walking until they were 18months old. It sounds like he zipped from sitting to crawling (and got seriously inventive with getting around on his back), and children often get frustrated with walking at first because it’s so much slower than the speed they can get with crawling.
And smelling of burnt carpet… Mark and I met doing firetwirling, so we’d both have this lingering scent of kerosene and singed hair… He’ll be all baby scented soon enough. I can’t wait for the day when you’re signing on to say “You’ll never guess what he managed to get into today. I just can’t keep up with this child!!”
You and Ronan are so amazing! I have always thought so. Ivy didn’t walk until she was 17 months actual and she was only 30 weeks prem. You are doing so well.