Premmie Baby Development | L'il Aussie Prems Blog

Ronan And Walking

November 17, 2007 By Julia Toivonen 3 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Premature Babies, Premmie Baby Development

Premature Baby & Sleeping Habits

November 16, 2007 By Julia Toivonen Leave a Comment

Babies who are born early usually need extra time to catch up to their full-term peers when it comes to developmental milestones, and sleep is no exception.

Why premature babies take longer to sleep through the night?

Premature babies can take longer than others to learn the difference between night and day, especially if they’ve been in a special care baby unit (SCBU), and they may need frequent feeds for a long time. While prem babies don’t need to reach a certain weight before they can sleep through the night, they will need a few more weeks or months than other babies before they can sleep for longer periods of time.

What can I do about it?

If you help her learn healthy sleep habits from the start, your baby will learn to sleep through the night on her own. She’ll just need a little more time. The average full-term baby sleeps through by six months, although some do take longer. To work out about how much longer your child will need, add the number of weeks or months early she was born to that age and use that figure as a rough guide. Be patient. By the end of the first year, most babies will sleep for 10-12 hours at a stretch at night. For more ideas, see our article on how to get your baby to sleep through the night.

Article from Baby Center

Filed Under: Premature Babies, Premmie Baby Development

Dealing with four month milestone delays

November 8, 2007 By Finisterre 4 Comments

Our daughter Talia recently had her first developmental review, at four months corrected. Prior to meeting the paediatrician, we completed a questionnaire asking where she was in terms of gross and fine motor control, social/communication, problem solving skills and so forth.

As a 27-weeker with a relatively smooth journey through the NICU (no major complications other than 11 weeks on CPAP), we thought she would be progressing normally for her corrected age. However, as we went through the questionnaire, we found ourselves ticking more and more “not yet” boxes. For example, she wasn’t reaching for things, playing with her hands or feet, putting objects in her mouth or putting any weight on her feet.

Consequently it was not particularly surprising when the paediatrician told us that our “four month old” was presenting as a three month old, in terms of development. I had thought I might feel upset or worried, but actually I just felt relieved that she was not being diagnosed with cerebral palsy or anything more serious. Yes, she is behind where full term babies are at four months, but then that is hardly surprising.

Today I took my daughter to a regular check up held by the physiotherapy department at the hospital where she was born, and that is when I really felt miserable. Babies who were roughly the same size when we were in the same ward seven months ago have raced ahead. They have grown further and faster than Talia, and they are reaching, playing with both hands, rolling. I should feel happy for the mothers of 24-weekers that their babies are doing so well; and really I shouldn’t be comparing at all, but I can’t help it. I so desperately want everything to be OK with Talia.

Around healthy full termers it is easy to justify that she’s behind because she was prem. Being the last in a group of prems is a much harder pill to swallow.

Filed Under: Premature Babies, Premmie Baby Development

Milestone Delay

September 3, 2007 By Julia Toivonen Leave a Comment

Ronan was born 3 months early and he has had quite a few setbacks with his gross motor skills. We have been going to physio for about a year now and it has been an amazing help for him.

He did not start rolling until he was around 7 months “corrected”, properly sitting until 13 months “corrected”, he is still not walking at 15 months “corrected” but he is standing and walking along holding onto the furniture. We have been working very closely with him with exercises at home until he reaches each milestone. He had a habit of head scooting backwards until he started to crawl. If he wants to get somewhere quicker though he does still occasionally head scoot which is quite cute but it makes you wonder if they will be doing it at 4 years old!

When we were told that Ronan needed physio it was actually quite dis-heartening. I felt like a failure as a mother because my child wasn’t developing at the rate of a “normal child” or full term baby but after attending and speaking with the physio it was actually a common thing amongst premature babies. We were also quite worried about the cost involved but after our appointment we were only charged $10 for 45mins. Ronan attends physio at the local hospital and it is the best thing we could have done.

One thing i have learnt with premature babies is that they do things their way and when they want to. Physio is a great way to encourage them to do things the easier way. In the first 5 months of Ronan being home i used to be like every other parent and read all about milestones and compared Ronan with the charts. I have thrown any charts out the window now and just concentrate on what he is doing now and encourage him with each new step no matter how slow.

Filed Under: Premmie Baby Development

Brain challenge for premature babies

July 1, 2007 By Julia Toivonen Leave a Comment

Babies born very prematurely have markedly less developed brains than those born at full term, a two-year Victorian study has revealed.

The study, which examined magnetic resonance images of premature babies’ brains and compared them with those of full-term infants, found that those born before 26 weeks gestation were at high risk of major brain development problems. This may explain why they are more prone to developmental difficulties later in life.

“Whatever happens in these babies’ brains, it’s not just injury, but abnormality,” said Terrie Inder, a pediatric neurologist at the Royal Children’s Hospital.

The study, headed by Dr Inder, involved three-dimensional brain scans of 260 babies born more than 10 weeks early and weighing less than 1250 grams. The team found the premature babies had about 30 per cent less grey matter – the brain’s thinking cells – than babies born at term. They also had about 40 per cent less white matter, which holds the brain’s fibre connections.

“What we found is that the brain does not grow as well when you’re born early,” Dr Inder said. The first group of children to be scanned under the MRI were now two, and were exhibiting some developmental delays compared with other children the same age.

It is hoped the findings will shed light on what happens to the brain when babies are born very early, and how that relates to the health and learning problems they are more prone to as they grow older. It will also help efforts to find ways to help nurture healthy brain development outside the womb.

Premature babies have a one in 10 risk of cerebral palsy; a quarter of them will need significant assistance at school; and they have a lower average IQ than term babies, Dr Inder said. More than 3000 babies are born in Australia at less than 30 weeks’ gestation. A full-term pregnancy runs to 40 weeks.

But the lifelong impact of extremely premature birth is still unknown, as it is only in the past decade that medicine has succeeded in keeping alive the tiniest babies – those born at 22 to 24 weeks.

The doubtful prognosis for some of these babies has sparked international debate and controversy.

In some parts of Holland babies born before 26 weeks are not resuscitated. (Experts in Australia argue the Dutch and Australian scenarios are not comparable, because premature babies born in Australia have a much better prognosis.)

Dr Inder, who is working on the study with colleagues from the Royal Women’s Hospital and the Howard Florey Institute, hoped that continuing research would reveal why the slowed brain development occurred, which would in turn help them to devise strategies to bridge the babies’ development gap.

Some of the team’s findings have been published in the Journal of Pediatrics, with several other papers under review.

Researchers were also focusing on the environment into which pre-term babies are born, Dr Inder said, including the levels of noise and light in neonatal intensive care units.

The conditions in which injury can be done to the infants’ brains, such as through infection or changes in blood pressure, was also being considered, even though it affected only a small proportion of the babies.

Dr Inder’s team is about to begin a trial looking at different ways of treating the babies to see if that helps their brain development, including having the mothers carry them on their chests, reducing medical tests, and making the unit as quiet and dark as possible to better replicate the womb.

Hormones were also suspected of playing a role in brain development, Dr Inder said. Her team was closely following a German trial in which premature baby girls – to date, researchers have been reluctant to recruit boys into the trial – are treated with oestrogen to see if this improves their brain development.

If that proved successful, exposure to oestrogen may become a future treatment option.

Lex Doyle, a consultant pediatrician at the Royal Women’s Hospital who is working on the study with Dr Inder, said although the differences in brain development uncovered so far were concerning “it’s still too early to know for sure what these MRI changes were showing”. There was no doubt that premature babies had a higher risk of long-term problems, Professor Doyle said, but “you’ve got to remember that most of them don’t have developmental problems; most of them are OK”.

Parents should contact their pediatrician if they are concerned about their child’s development.

Article from Fairfax Digital

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