Battle for the Bulge

We have been doing repositional therapy to help with Kara's flat head. This basically means that we try to keep her from resting the back of her head against any hard surface. This has been going great during napping/sleeping times because she quickly took to sleeping on her side and stomach. Thank goodness! But the waking hours have been a bit more challenging since Kara still prefers being on her back while playing. In fact, it is very easy to tell when she is on her back even if you are not in the room because she gives a "victory yell" and starts babbling like crazy.

We have been working hard to keep tummy time fun, and we are hoping that Kara soon develops an interest in crawling. We have been trying to motivate her by putting her favorite toys just out of reach. This tactic is good, but the trick is figuring out which toy is her favorite for the day. Kara is kind of weird about her toys. Or maybe this is just how babies act, and I never realized it.

Every few days she picks a new favorite toy. Sometimes it is something I would expect her to want, like a big, colorful, stuffed caterpillar or a drum that lights up and makes fun sounds when she hits it (my personal favorite..if she doesn't want to play with it, I will). But more often than not, she gets obsessed with things I didn't even know were toys.

For instance, chair legs. She likes to use them as an anchor as she rolls herself back and forth. They also make good chew toys apparently. Another great toy is the toilet paper roll that the dog sneaked out of the trash can. It is not colorful, nor does it make noise. I have no idea why it is so cool. As you can see in the video on the previous blog post, last week's favorite toy was the letter 'F'. Not 'M', not 'J'. She was only interested in the 'F'.

So, the battle for the bulge continues. We have 6 more weeks before the doctors reassess her head.

Baby News - 7 Months

It's every parents hope that their child(ren) will continually develop. I find this to be especially true when it comes to mobility. Parents love to talk about when their kids begin crawling and walking. And rightfully so. These are (literally) their first tangible steps of independence.

Kara is starting down the path of mobility - and she seems to be gaining speed as the days go by. Last month, she could only reach things immediately around herself. This month, she's getting her whole body into the action for some long distance reaching - and it looks like the precursor to crawling.

Plagiocephaly

Plagiocephaly is the fancy term for flat head. It can often be caused by spending large amounts of time putting pressure on one area of the head. Kara has plagiocephaly.

We have been working hard to correct this over the past 2 months, but her little head only seems to be making modest progress at rounding out. So, we got to take an exciting journey to Texas Children's Hospital where Kara had an appointment with the neurosurgeon to get evaluated for a helmet.

She did a great job laying still while they scanned her head and took measurements. Here is a picture of the little head cover that she had to wear to hold down her curls while they did the scan.

The conclusion of the evaluation was that she probably won't need a helmet, but they don't want her on her back at all...including while she sleeps. This is bad news for us because she has preferred back sleeping (with a blanket over her face) since the day she was born.

This is a picture of how she typically sleeps. You can see her hand sticking out of the blanket on the left side.

This is going to be hard, but as you can see we are already making a little progress. Hopefully this will no longer be an issue soon.