18 Months Old!

Yesterday Mena had her 18 month check up at the doctor's office. She is 33 1/8 inches long (88%), 25 pounds 13 ounces (73%), and her head is 18 3/4 inches (75-90%). The last month has been a bit rough for Mena--she's got 5 new teeth that have broken through the skin. That brings her up to a total of 9 teeth. The funny thing is that usually teeth will come in from front to back, but she's getting some of her molars before all her teeth to the front! Nothing wrong with that but I had no idea she had a molar coming in and one day I saw something in her mouth. I stuck my finger in to get out whatever she had "picked up" and discovered it was a molar! Mena continues to wear size 2 tops and her pants are size 12-18 months. Mena has continued to improve her walking skills. She can now walk across the room without falling and sometimes can make it into another room before loosing her balance.

The doctor said that if he didn't know her medical history he would say she were a totally healthy 14-15 month old. But she's 18 months old. At her 12 month check up she was at the developmental level of a 10 month old (2 months behind). At her 18 month check up she is now 3-4 months behind. Dr. Bernhardson is happy that she's making progress but concerned because she's falling further behind. He's asked for a report from Mena's physical therapist and suggested that we need to go back to meeting weekly with the PT. When Mena started walking the PT suggested that she didn't need to come weekly any more. Mena went 3 weeks without walking more than 2-3 steps at a time so I'd already requested the PT to come back for a follow up visit. She'll be here on March 17th so we'll be able to discuss what her opinion is versus what the pediatrician's opinion is. Mena's language is more like 6 months behind and he was glad that the speech therapist has continued to come weekly.

Because Mena's physical development is continuing to fall further behind, Dr. Bernhardson wanted to draw blood to run some tests to see if we can find a cause for her developmental delay. I can't remember everything he was trying to tell me yesterday, but I know one of the tests was for muscular dystrophy. We'll hear back on some of the tests today and the rest will be back in a week. He doesn't think any of them will come back positive but we'd rather rule things out now than find out later we could have been doing something for Mena earlier. About a year ago Mena was sick and they drew blood trying to find out what was wrong at that time. The doctor is going to compare this recent blood work with the blood work from a year ago to see if that will tell him anything, also. If we can find a specific diagnosis then we can get specialists involved to help Mena. If we can't find a specific diagnosis then we'll continue working with our PT and speech therapist. There is also a possibility that he will send us to a specialist (I can't remember what kind) to have her evaluated to see if that person can find a particular reason for Mena's developmental delay. I'll put another post on our blog when we get the test results back.