8 Weeks (No, Not *That*)

Eight weeks from yesterday, it will be 1 year since Miss A entered the world.

I'm not sure where the time has gone. It has been an amazing, incredible year.

So many things are different. Our house is filled with baby stuff. There is clutter, and I don't care. It's wonderful, happy baby clutter. I am just thrilled that we have a reason to have it. That we have her. R is happy now, all the time. He has more balance in his life. He still works really hard, but Miss A is his first priority. He doesn't have a need to bury himself in his work anymore to block out the hell we've gone through.

A few things are still the same. I still wait for the other shoe to drop a little bit. I'm still hesitant to speak too far into the future. Yet, I bought her a bunch of 3T pajamas yesterday (because I've already bought her a ton of 18 month and 2T stuff), so apparently I'm more okay with looking into the future in some ways than others.

I plan to nurse her until 1 year and then wean soon after that so that we can go back to Denver, hopefully this summer. But I can't imagine not nursing her. So if anyone has any tips on how to handle that, from either the literal or emotional perspective, please share.

Overall, Miss A is doing great. One of the teachers in her day care room had raised some concerns a while back about her gross motor skills. We had her evaluated at the time, and she was borderline, so we had her re-evaluated before Christmas. She was still borderline on that evaluation, which is an initial, high-level evaulation, so she had a more in-depth evaluation a couple of weeks ago.

She was 10 days away from her 10-month birthday at that point, and she tested as 10 months, 10-11 months or 11 months in all areas (cognitive, communication, fine motor, social/emotional, and adaptive/self-help) except for gross motor skills. In that, she tested at 5 months, so she begins therapy soon.

The therapist thinks it's possible that the torticollis she had when she was younger is what's affecting her gross motor skills, so we're not overly concerned at this point. And she is making progress consistently, it's just not as fast as would be expected. She knows how to roll over from her back to her stomach and vice versa, going either left or right. But she doesn't roll repeatedly to get to things. Actually, she doesn't move around very much in general - she'll usually just sit and cry or lay and cry if she can't reach what she wants. But we did see her start to move around more this weekend, and she was apparently moving all around the room at day care today, so maybe that's about to change. (She moves by laying on her stomach with her chest off the ground and using her arms to push herself backward.)

And she has started to get up on all fours (for about 5 seconds at a time) and rock back and forth, but she doesn't crawl yet. She also doesn't try to pull up on things or stand. She can bear some weight on her legs, but she doesn't like to, and we have to support some of her weight rather than just offer assistance in balancing her. On the bright side, all of this means that we've had more time than we expected to be able to baby-proof...

Last weekend, I started doing some preliminary planning for her 1st birthday. It's surreal. We have a birthday party to plan for a child. I remember all those times when I read about other moms doing that, and I would wonder if I'd ever have a baby to plan a party for. And now she's been here for almost a year. Amazing.