March 2011 – Eva's Story

Last week Eva had her 2 year old Bayley Assessment. Last Friday, 25th, was her due date thus when she is thought to be 2 years corrected. The Mercy Hospital do this assessment for all their premature babies at 2 and 4 years. We would have had the same in Bristol.

The assessment was run by Elaine a psychologist with amazing patience and a very quick mind. The kit pictured here is what she used to assess Eva’s cognition, language, social-emotional, motor and adaptive behaviour. Some activities had to be timed and all activity changes had to be quick while dealing with a 2 year old. It didn’t take Eva long to want to be the person opening the drawer to find the new activities instead of the one doing the activities!

Eva wasn’t really into pointing at pictures in the book (I guess we don’t do enough pointing) and it took her a while to warm up with her speech. I’m amazed at the information Elaine could glean from each interaction with Eva. Elaine kept swapping sections in her book to mark off different competencies as Eva completed them.

It isn’t often that you stop and watch your child demonstrate their abilities. Some skills I was impressed that Eva could do so well. She is just changing so often that the small differences just blend into the big changes.

Overall Elaine was delighted with Eva for a 25 weeker and will send us a full report later. From what Eva demonstrated Elaine found that she was at 21 months for gross motor skills, 24 months for social behaviour, 29 months for fine motor skills and 31 months for language and comprehension. It does seem to us that her language is just zooming along every week. Eva frequently uses 4 word sentences now and links ideas that we have only discussed with her once. It is just scary to see what sponges they are. Everything that we say and do is absorbed and stored.

Overall the Bayley Assessment was a very interesting process and I was just tired watching what Elaine had to get out of Eva in that hour! As always we feel amazingly blessed for this fantastic outcome and for the miracle of our daughter every day.

Practicing her Gross Motor Skills

Last week Eva and I attended the Growth & Development clinic at the Mercy Hospital. This coincided with her 2 year corrected age which was last Friday (25th). At the clinic she was seen by a Paediatrician and a Psychologist.

Dr Anne the Paediatrician was the first to assess Eva. Lots of the assessment was asking me to confirm the milestones that Eva was up to. It gave me a good chance to reflect on what Eva is doing these days. All the time Eva was throwing the toys out of the box, attempting to escape out the door and raiding her bag for snacks. Never a still moment did she have!

Eva’s physical assessment came out just fine. Eva was so good and sat still for everything, including her blood pressure which I thought that she would be concerned about. We are excited that Eva now weighs 11.05kg (which only took her 2 months to gain a kilo this time) and has shot up 3cm to 84cm. Several people had commented on her height change so I wasn’t surprised. You can still see her spine and ribs but she is healthy. I find that Eva is having weeks of immense hunger then weeks of less than average eating. So I guess that it all balances out in the end.

Dr Anne was happy with Eva’s 2 year old assessment and will write us a full report soon. Dr Anne just wants us to keep going as we are. The next Paediatrician visit is in May with Dr Dan so we have a big break now.

I have written about the visit with the Psychologist in a separate post as it is a bit longer.