The boys need to put on weight. They are tiny little dots- not surprising given their birth sizes - but they've fallen off the bottom of the percentile chart.
Part of me wants to say chart shmart. The other part of me desperately wants to get them up there on it.
They've never been well and truly on it. You can't when you are born at only a couple of pounds. But they have managed to reach about the 5th percentile at various points in the past nearly two years.
But now that they're running around, you can see that they're little. They still haven't reached 10kg, which is apparently average for a one year old. They still wear size 0 clothes or 9-12 months.
Their GP has me adding butter and cream to food. We're attempting to add avocado with varying levels of success, and we're also supplementing their diet with sustagen, which isn't going down that well. I can't seem to hide it well enough, and they sniff it out before it gets anywhere near their mouths!
I know they have a whole lifetime ahead of them to grow. But nonetheless it's still stressful. I think so much of it is to do with them being premature and VLBW. They had intrauterine growth restriction and were born at the size of a baby at about 28-29 weeks gestation. So much of their first year - and particularly the first few months - was focused on how much weight they were gaining. It's hard to break the habit of constantly keeping a watchful eye on it.
I'm sure that if I had delivered full term twins with no size concerns I wouldn't have the slightest idea what they currently weigh.
But I'm working on it. They're happy and they're healthy. Surely that's as good an indicator as anything :)
My good friend had exactly the same issue with her little boy - he wasn't born premature but has always been under the weight scale or 5th percentile occasionally. She was so stressed and had paediatrician appointments etc. (they recommended butter in the diet too) At the end of the day, he was scoffing down all his food and her other 2 children were tiny too. Nevertheless, I can understand why it must be a stress for you constantly worrying about it x
ReplyDeleteIsn't it stressful? We either panic about our babies being too big or too small. I still remember the day I weighed my son, the scales told me he'd lost a few kgs and I burst into tears, and cried for about half an hour. I was still breastfeeding at this point and utterly convinced I wasn't doing a good job and depriving him. Turns out the scales were broken and he was perfectly fine- but still, the stress!
ReplyDeleteIf they are happy and healthy, that's 90% of the issue solved. The rest will come.