Saturday, April 5, 2014

Ciao!

Ciao!  Greetings from Italy:)  We are so happy to be back and to be settling back into la dolce vita.  I promise to get back into the blogging swing of things and post more updates on Caroline.  She is doing really well.  We have met with her cardiologist here in Rome and things are looking good following appointments to check her heart and leg growth (one of her iliac arterties became occluded following her cath procedure post birth resulting in a difference in leg growth).  Other than that she is a normal baby, though her father would say that she is "very advanced." ;)  She started rolling over at three months, both front to back and back to front.  She is five months now and can sit up by herself.  She also loves to stand, assisted of course, she's not that advanced!  This ability to be vertical has come with a virulent rejection of tummy time, think hysterical crying.  In my new mom craziness, I am convinced that she will never learn how to crawl and thus those valuable pathways that crawling forms in the brain will never form and...well, you get the idea. (I think Ryan comes home to hear me babble on about a new insane mom worry at least every other day.)  Caroline is a very vocal baby and smiles a lot.  She has really big blue eyes which garners her quite a bit of attention.  The Italians coo over her and call her amore and patatina (the latter literally translates to small potato).  Caroline has started sipping water from a cup and seems to relish it, pulling the cup to her and trying to get as much as possible.  True to European form she enjoys fizzy water :)  The Italians keep telling us to start her on solid food, aka pasta, but we will wait a bit longer.

In other news, Caroline was recently featured on the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital blog and Facebook page (direct link to the blog article: http://uofmhealthblogs.org/childrens/hero-stories/fetal-cardiac-intervention-reedy/12258/).  We went back and forth on whether to "go public" with our story but finally decided that if by sharing our experience we could give hope to other families out there it was worth it.  Her story got shared on Facebook over 600 times and was liked close to 3,700 times!

Here is a link to C.S. Mott's page on Prenatal Care for Aortic Stenosis: http://www.mottchildren.org/medical-services/prenatal-care-aortic-stenosis  It explains Caroline's condition, critical aortic stenosis, and has videos by two of her doctors.  A link to the blog article about Caroline is featured on the top right of the page.  We really can't say enough what a wonderful place Mott's is.  Without their incredible fetal heart specialists and maternal fetal medicine specialists we would not be where we are today; back in Rome with a thriving five month old.

2 comments:

  1. So Happy for you guys!!! CAroline is one lucky lady!

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