Developmental report

We got the report back from the Early Childhood Intervention team, and as expected, Elijah has some significant delays. He scored the lowest possible score for gross motor, which didn't surprise us at all, and his gross motor delays seem to be affecting other areas. If he can't get around to explore, he's not going to be as stimulated cognitively, so that's what is happening. His cognitive scores were pretty low as well. His fine motor and adaptive skills were great and his language and social skills were good. Here's the funny part...he scored the highest possible score on LEISURE. That's our boy! Dan and I got a pretty good laugh out of that. Starting on December 3rd, we'll have therapists coming to our house weekly to help him to improve in the areas needed. Our first thing to focus on will be gross motor. We actually have been focusing on gross skills all along, so it's a little frustrating that we aren't seeming to get anywhere. Hopefully these new people can really help us out.

I should also point out that they did NOT take his prematurity into account when coming up with these percentiles, so he's a little better off than they report him to be. Also, there are things that he is able to do that are listed on the report as him not being able to do, so this report is not entirely accurate. I have to share these two lines from the report: "Elijah did not demonstrate rolling to his stomach and cried when assisted into this position," and "Elijah played with his toys contentedly and jabbered during much of the observation." That's Elijah in a nutshell.

He went through the night without eating again! He did need a few back rubs because his plugged, boogery nose woke him up a few times, but those episodes are getting less frequent. I don't want to jinx anything here, but I believe we are soon going to have a sleep-through-the-nighter!!

Dan is taking Eli to his cardiology check today. We'll post later with the details of that. Our sweet skydiving friends Tammy and Doug offered to come down and watch Elijah for an evening on Saturday so we can get out for a few hours and have some adult time. We're very excited for that. Tammy and Doug are so nice to do this. They live pretty far away, so it will be quite a drive to get here and back. Thank you, guys!