The school year has gotten off to another great start. Jonas loves preschool. He does get a little bored, but the social interaction is good for him. He is reading at a great level now (well any level is great considering he is 4), and loves to just sit with us to read. He is restarting gymnastics next week. One of the things I love abour working part time is that I get to sign him up for things like gymnastics.
We started a new eating behavior modification. Since dinner is our biggest challenge we decided to tackle it first. The change has been amazing. We decided we had to take the entire power struggle out of the equation. He gets 30 minutes. We set a large timer that he can watch count down. When it goes off, he is done... he could have eaten nothing, or everything.. doesn't matter, when it rings dinner is over. IF he ate everything, he gets a sticker for his "chart". Stickers earn him different trains. He helped me make the chart, and chose each train that he wanted. So the chart has a picture of what he is working for each time. If he hasn't eaten when time is up, dinner is just finished. No sticker, but no extra attention either. It is clean your plate and go play. It has worked wonders! Dinner is a much more pleasant time without everything hanging over our heads. Jonas won his first reward last night. He was so excited
.Jonas had an endo appt yesterday. He is 30 lbs 8 ounces, 97 cm... while he did grow, it was the low end of average. He is still hanging on to his curve, barely, at less than 1st%tile. At this point, even if he grows "normally", he will never reach a "normal" height. After over 4 years of "wait and see", we are considering the growth hormone option for him. While we struggle with this decision, we have to think about Jonas, his well-being, and his future. While healthwise, he may be ok without intervention, psychologically we fear there will be much more damage. Even at 4 he realizes that he is so much smaller than the other kids, and it is beginning to effect him. Without intervention we have little hope he will even reach 5 feet, much less surpass it. GH has been in use for over 50 years, with very positive results, and limited side effects. The side effects are minor, and very little report of long term effects, other than positive growth. He will require treatment until he is 17-20 years of age. We are waiting on insurance approval. According to their website, they will approve it for kids who are SGA, or more than 2 standard deviations below normal.
Speaking of SGA, we have also discovered that J is indeed SGA. When Jonas was born, there was question as to how far along i actually was. According to the OB, Jonas was 34 weeks and a few days... but the NICu staff felt that because of his tiny size he was more than likely younger, estimating 31-32 weeks. After seeing a maternal/fetal specialist, it was decided that J was indeed 34 weeks. At our 20 week sonogram, Jonas was measuring 20 weeks, perfect for his age. his size was normal. If he was actually younger we would have seen it then. So somewhere between 20 and 34 weeks, J stopped growing appropriately. This at least tells us that he has had this problem since well before birth. Unfortunately no one knows why he stopped growing, but the fact that he did could have contributed to his early birth. There is no way of knowing what happened, or what caused this growth retardation. It could possibly be a random genetic disorder, and we could see a geneticist... but the end result wouldn't matter much. It is unlikely that we would find out what it is, without a clue as where to look. There are so many genetic disorders, we can't look at them all. and the basic fact is, it won't change anything.
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