Normal life

What do you know, we've gone almost 2 weeks without any sort of medical appointment! (The last thing we had was his head ultrasound, which will have been 2 weeks ago as of tomorrow, and his next appointment is with his GI docs next Friday). Although his head size, among other things, is still a nagging worry in the back of our minds, life has been pretty normal.

Magnus has continued to make steady progress with his weight gain, and along with that has also been making progress with his gross motor skills. He's still extremely delayed for his age in that department, but interestingly seems to be progressing in a weight-appropriate, rather than age-appropriate, manner. By that I mean that now, at almost 10 months, he weighs about 14.5 pounds, which is the 50th percentile for weight for a 4 month old, and he is doing things like starting to be able to sit on his own for 10-20 seconds and to bear all his weight on his legs. These are the types of gross motor skills that typically develop around 4-6 months. So we're hopeful that as he continues to catch up weight-wise, he'll also catch up in his gross motor skills.

In a related development, Magnus has finally started receiving early intervention services. For the past two Fridays, an early interventionist has been coming to our house, but we're actually going to start seeing a different early interventionist this week who has a bit more expertise with delays related to health problems. Apparently, the early interventionist he saw before was assigned to us before the agency providing services had gotten his paperwork, so the early interventionist showed up at our door not knowing anything about him, despite the fact that we went through all that testing! Anyway, I could write a lengthy screed complaining about all the bureaucratic ridiculousness of getting him early intervention services, but I fear it would be very uninteresting so I'll just say that I'm glad he is finally getting services.

Meanwhile, Magnus continues to be his usual charming self. He's very into toys that make noise these days, which means that he loves rattles and his toy xylophone. He also loves to grab people's faces; last night he stuck his finger up my nostril and scratched me so hard that I got a nosebleed! Time to trim his nails again, I guess.

Good news

Magnus had his head ultrasound yesterday morning. It went very smoothly, starting with the great street parking space I scored right in front of the building with money still on the meter!

The ultrasound tech remembered Magnus; she had done his head and abdominal ultrasounds on the day he was born. The scan itself was really easy, she was able to do it without him even getting out of the stroller. One other nice thing she did was that she kept saying what a good boy he was being, even though he was a little fussy. It's happened more than a few times now that other medical personnel have expressed their frustration when Magnus has gotten fussy during a procedure, which makes the whole thing really stressful, because not only am I trying to comfort him (often under circumstances where he is justified in acting fussy) I also feel like I have to comfort the technician, as well! So, I appreciated that she said that, but even more than that, I appreciated the fact that as we were leaving, she whispered to me that his ultrasound looked normal.

Of course, I knew that the scan needed to be read by the radiologist to get the official word, which came back from our pediatrician today. Indeed, his ultrasound was normal.

The caveat is that this doesn't necessarily rule out problems with increased pressure in his brain; all they can see from an ultrasound is whether his ventricles are enlarged. However, the fact that they are not is very good. The plan now is to continue to monitor his head growth; if it continues to be overly rapid, we will have to do some other sort of more invasive testing like an MRI (bad because he would have to be fully sedated for this) or a CT scan (bad because it involves exposure to a high dose of radiation). Hopefully neither will be needed.