…where Livy is moving on from the bottle

Lots of updates about Olivia! So let’s get down to it!

We’ll start with the recent sickness. The first two weeks of July were not fun for us. Liv got a nasty bug. It started with gastro issues and then after the first few days morphed into congestion. It was hard because she did not want to eat or drink. We worked really hard to keep her hydrated enough to not be hospitalized. We did make one visit to the ER, but did not get admitted. She turned the corner Monday of this week, and we are so thankful our Lil’ Liv is feeling better. But she did lose almost a whole pound on her already tiny frame. She did gain 3 oz back in four days, so we are hopeful she will continue to gain it back in a short amount of time.

We do have a silver lining that has come from being sick. It seems like Olivia is drinking out of her straw cups more and we may be retiring the bottles, which would be amazing! We do have to distract her with a little show while she drinks. But she will drink 6 ounces of her Kendamil chocolate shake in 10min. So we do that with her three times a day. And then throughout the rest of the day she has water and pedialyte to drink from. This is such a huge milestone for her. It is a big answer to prayer and we are so proud of our girl.

PT and child development are still going well. we have met them a couple of times at parks and that has been really fun to see Olivia explore and learn. She is so social. She wants to say hi to everyone she see there.

We also had our appt with outpatient pulmonology at the beginning of June and they were all happy about Liv’s progress.

At the end of June we saw High Risk and they did their yearly evaluation. They were excited about how well Olivia was doing. It is really crazy how far she has come, especially over the last three months. Here are the results from her assessment:

Communication (Receptive and Expressive: Superior Range
Physical Development (Gross and Fine Motor): Average
Cognitive: Above Average
Social-Emotional: Above Average
Adaptive Behavior: Average

We are amazed by her everyday. In this last week Jeremy and I have both looked at each other multiple times and said, “What happened to our baby?”

This week we met with our new speech therapist at Sutter and loved her. She was so encouraging with Liv’s progress. We are happy that we are back on track with monthly appointments through Sutter for speech and then hoping to get connected with another speech therapist through Alta Regional Services.

In the next few months Olivia will have an appointment with audiology. There are no concerns with her hearing but it is an appt that all high risk kiddos get around two, just to check everything out.

Numbers: