Darn it, I AM GOING to blog.
The Honeybee is A WHOLE YEAR OLD now, and just grew fully into 6-month clothing. HA. She is tiny. But DETERMINED. Absolutely 100% determined that she WILL catch up to her brother, and from there, conquer the known universe. She is pushing a milk crate around the kitchen, pulling up on everything there is, and just a few days ago, took SIX STEPS in a row, holding onto nothing.
We joke she's on a seafood diet, she sees food, she wants it. I've been rather sloppy this time around with introducing things one at a time and slowly. "Yes, this is pretty pasta salad. Not for you... oh what the heck." She likes everything. She likes rices, pastas, vegetables, meats, everything. If you can dice it small enough, she will eat it. She enjoyed shreds of my pickled ginger at a sushi buffet. Her birthday meal was tilapia with ginger mayonnaise sauce, and sweet potato hash browns. She emptied her plate by the fistful. I can't eat in front of her if I'm not willing to share. No teeth yet - drooling and chewing on stuff since Mother's Day, but no teeth yet.
It is so much fun to WATCH a baby's development this time around - just sit back and watch, and not do a thing about it. With Kittyboy, we were teaching him stuff, with Honeybee it's "Holy cow! You're doing THAT!... Okay then..." And it forces us to be creative sometimes, like with having her push a milk crate, because when she started doing that, she was still in 3-month clothes. They did NOT make walking toys for babies her size. I expected that by the time her legs were long enough for a walker, she'd BE walking, and I was basically right.
Her heart murmur, praise God, has shrank a bit, and her cardiologist had the honor of being the one to discover her extreme anemia. He asked, when he saw her at the end of September, whether he could check her levels, juuuust to be sure. Maybe she really was "that" pale naturally - and maybe she was naturally SO pale that even her sinus membranes were lighter than normal - but he'd like to just be sure. I asked if it was a heel stick or blood draw, because I gave my already tiny daughter my tiny, tiny veins, and he said just a heel stick, so I said sure. I didn't really think anything of it, because my mother and grandfather and great-grandmother are all very fair-skinned, and she's always been very fair. Well, I forgot to turn my phone's ringer back on when I left, and at 4:30, I realized I had three missed calls, from two different numbers, and an ominous voicemail that mentioned following up with our family doctor the next morning. I called back. The office was closed. Then the cardiologist himself called, after hours. Her "number", hemocrit I think, was supposed to be at least 10.5. It was 6. "I'm so glad I saw her just this morning, so I know she's stable." "Children with anemia of this level are at risk for heart failure," was one of the oh-so-comforting sentences I remember.
Started her on lots of iron. Found out she didn't tolerate that well, and after taking a shower with her, fully clothed, because I knew no other way to deal with the Explosive Iron Barf covering her clothes, my clothes, and in my hair, we started soaking bits of toast with it. Infuse a large enough portion of empty carbs with it, and she would take it and keep it down. Thank God, we are over that. Our second health hurdle, out of the way. I'm told babies can turn anemic around six months, because that's when the mom's iron in their blood runs out and they have to make all their own, and I was thinking "but she only just had her six-month checkup, how could she be THAT anemic, THAT quickly?" and then I remembered this is one thing where adjusted age doesn't mean anything - it's how long the baby's been out of the womb. And she was actually six months in July, not September. So she'd actually been quietly going anemic for the past two months when the cardiologist caught it!
No comments:
Post a Comment