Weight watchers

After six consecutive sleepless nights, we begged Bryce to give us at least four hours of uninterrupted rest last night. It seems our plea did not fall on deaf ears, because he woke for the first time at 5 this morning, after nearly 8 hours without so much as a whimper. The worst of the cold appears to have passed, and he finished up with the steroids (which were causing his hands to shake piteously) yesterday, so I'm guessing he was as eager for a good's night sleep as we were.

Not long after he was a born, I referred to Bryce as our "pint-sized progeny." One year later, that appellation still has a ring of truth to it. After his first check-up at the NICU clinic, I bragged that Bryce was in the 90th percentile for weight on the micro-preemie charts, and approaching the 50th percentile for his adjusted age on the normal infant charts. However, I've since discovered that the latter claim was based on an erroneous online percentile calculator. After pulling the latest charts from the CDC and running the numbers myself, here's what I found:



In the graph, the horizontal axis lists Bryce's adjusted age (in months), and the vertical axis displays weight (in pounds) and also his percentile on the infant charts. As you can see, while he has been steadily moving up on the charts since month one (with the exception of the last month, which was hopefully a fluke caused by illness), Bryce has never been in any danger of being described as average-sized.

Despite his small size, we're still hopeful that he'll catch up eventually. He's not a great eater, but he hasn't exhibited any of the feeding problems that we've been anxiously anticipating. In fact, he seemed thrilled when we gave him his first taste of table food this morning, but I'll let you be the judge of that:



Perhaps the new big boy food will help him chunk up a bit! Print this post