20. Jun, 2013

we needed some guidelines / benchmarks

I needed something to go by - we had been told - failure to thrive - so I needed a benchmark to measure Melissa's progress by.  Each day we made progress - facing each day - new challenges.  Our 2 main issues were fluid intake and sleep for her. We found we could not lie her down and even with the raised cot she could stop breathing very easily.  So we just had to manage holding her so she slept comfortably.  I used our couch -two couches together on the angle and we would take turns holding her and then when we fell asleep in the corner seat she was quite safe being held and we could relax and doze feeling her breathe.  For the first few months this was the most successful outcome.  Our neighbour was very kind and formed part of our sleep support in the early days.  We had a big scare in our first week home when I realised Melissa had stopped breathing in her pram right on tea time - however as soon as I picked her up she started again.  Very scary.

So back to benchmarks - we were given the form in the photo to record milestones - so we could measure progress even though we had nothing to measure from - didn't really matter as long as we could see and feel progress.  We felt very isolated.  Hence I recorded everything we did so I had benchmarks, success and failure all documented.