Sunday, September 4, 2011

9 Month Pictures & an Update

As promised, here are some pictures from our 9 month shoot this afternoon, and as a bonus, a couple from this morning!



Judith at 9 months



She LOVES to play the organ! (pardon the blurriness from my moving child)


Proud Daddy!


We may have a future organist on our hands!


As you can see from the pictures, Judith started sticking her tongue out at everyone...again.  And now we have the added benefit of raspberries being blown at us constantly!  I know it's not a real milestone, but I find it humorous, and I'm glad she's mimicking us!

I also learned very quickly how difficult it may be to take pictures of Judith, especially if I would like her to sit still.  This is stemming from one of our newest milestones: Judith is very quickly becoming a mobile baby!  She is creeping all over the place, and is oh-so-close to crawling - she just needs to figure out how to coordinate the movement of her arms and legs, then she'll be off!  She's already taking a big interest in the dogs, and I can't wait to see what will happen once she can crawl after them.  Of course we're starting to teach her how to be gentle with them, and monitor all of them closely while they interact.  I am very grateful that our pups have been through the baby stages before - they had young children in their former home, so they are remembering what it's like.

Lady is very tolerant of Judith, and really loves her!  I am shocked, because Lady is so active and doesn't like to sit still to receive attention from most people.  She wants the attention, but is usually moving while receiving it.  I took this picture the other day when both Judith and Lady were interacting with each other:



Naturally, about a minute later, Lady decided Judith needed some kisses:



I can always tell when Judith's sweating and losing more salt, because the dogs lick her more.

We had our Occupational Therapy (OT) evaluation on Thursday, and overall things are looking good.  We are going to start OT services because Judith is a bit delayed with her fine motor skills, but the therapist didn't see anything overly significant or anything that's going to take a long time to correct.  Basically we're staying on top of things and nipping anything in the bud before it does become a serious problem.

We may have a bigger problem to deal with, though: during the evaluation, the OT confirmed my concern about Judith's eyes.  If you look closely at the first picture of Judith and Lady, you can kind of see what I'm concerned about.  She is crossing them more often, and has to constantly reposition them to focus on something.  If the muscles around the eye are functioning normally, the eyes will follow your movements and readjust themselves without us having to think about it.  What the therapist saw with Judith is her muscles aren't doing this properly, and there's a lag with their movement - she's working and thinking to refocus them herself.  I believe I posted before that we know she's far-sighted; however, since we're concerned and the therapist noticed something's up, we are not going to wait a year to have her checked.  I am going to talk to her pediatrician at her 9 month well-baby check and ask for a referral to a pediatric opthamologist to see (haha) what's up.  I wouldn't think this is caused by the ROP, but I could be wrong.  I'm not even sure if this is a normal preemie thing, or if this is caused by the crappy vision history in our family, and I'm hoping the eye doc can give us some answers.

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