Matty's Blog

Hi Guys. It’s been a while since i’ve updated, and yep, you guessed it, we’ve been busy.. man have we been busy. Barely a day goes by when we don’t notice some new skill that Matthew’s picked up.

So, where to begin in the recap of the last few months… Well.. lets start at the end and work our way back. Matty passed the one year anniversary of his due date about two weeks ago. He’s now up to about 8.5 kilos and although he’s slowed in his weight gain, he’s still making some progress. He’s doing pretty well with his solids these days, and is keen for a variety of different types of foods. We’ve been trying out all sorts of new flavours and he’s been pretty accepting, all things considered.

MMMm chocolate pudding. Note the inaccuracy with the spoon

Speaking of feeds, a few weeks ago we made the decision to drop his 3am feed. Pam is pretty grateful for the uninterrupted nights sleep these days, and in fact, I think Matty’s happier too. He sleeps all the way through the evening from around 11pm until around 9 to 9:30 every morning.

Matthew had his 1 year corrected developmental followup with neonatal. It’s the kind of visit where he gets to play with a whole heap of toys such as blocks and string and other bits and pieces whilst the doctors watch how he goes. As expected, Matthew’s unfortunately quite behind… but like i said, all things considered he’s doing ok. In fact, it really seems sometimes that Matthew’s mind is way ahead of what his body can handle. You can see he gets frustrated at times, because he really wants to do the next skill before he’s mastered the first one. I guess in that respect he’s like his dad.. bored easily.

At about the same time as Matthew’s 1yr followup, we also switched care from the neonatology dept over to the early intervention clinic. This means that Matthew’s now in the care of a different team of specialists and we get to have big meetings with them all about once every few months. At the end of the last meeting we got a really good overview of Matthew’s skills (as graded by the hospital). Speech therapy is really thrilled with the variety of vocal sounds that Matthew is using. The physio is pretty happy with Matthew’s newly acquired skill of sitting unaided although they do agree that when he does get tired, he tends to throw himself backwards, so it’s important that we’ve always got a soft landing spot for him. The EIC also gave us lots of tips and advice on ways that we can help Matthew progress with his current skills and lead him towards the next steps.

Bathtime!

At Matthew’s last ENT (ear nose and throat) appointment, they expressed some concern about his apneoas that he seems to have (discovered on his sleep study). Whilst the incidents have only been mild, they’ve recommended surgery to remove Matty’s adenoids in January – so it looks like we’ll be spending another night in hospital in the new year. If all goes well with the surgery, it might be a simple day procedure and we’ll get to go home the same day.

Last time we mentioned that Matthew might be coming off oxygen soon. Well, we’ve been completely off oxygen for a few months and although we did have to put him back on for a couple of nights during a small cold, he’s been doing really well without it. We even felt confident enough to send all those oxygen cylinders back to BOC (we did keep a single small cylinder as a security blanket).

Shortly after going off the oxygen, we also weaned ourselves off the pulse oximeter. The only tube that Matthew has left is his NGT (unfortunately, it still looks like that one’s going to hang around for a while longer).

As for Matthew’s stomal surgery, there’s still no plans to do the reversal just yet. In all honesty, it’s working well so if it ain’t broke, there’s no need to fix it (yet).

Matty takes a snooze on a sunday evening after a big day out.

Apart from medical stuff, with the transition of the seasons to spring, we’ve been able to get out a lot more. In fact, in the last few weeks, we’ve done 17km of the Bibbulman Track with Matty, been birdwatching at the Rio Tinto & Birds Australia annual birdwatch and generally gotten out a whole lot more. In fact, we all went out this afternoon for ice cream at the beach

A stop for lunch on the Bibbulman between Mundaring and Kalamunda

So.. That’s Matthew’s progress over the last wee while. All in all, we’ve been pretty busy, and if that wasn’t enough, we’ve decided to fill in our spare time (lol, as if we had any spare time)  with other things such as my new job, selling our appartment and buying a new house. Just before christmas we’ll be moving into a huge 5 bedroom house in the northern suburbs where we’ll have heaps of room for the dog to run around, Matty to crawl and a place for babysitters (read: grandparents) to stay!

November 29th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed