If you don’t want to read stuff, skip to the bottom for the TLDR and pictures.

I haven’t been posting much lately.  Raising an infant is really exhausting, and I haven’t been able to muster much energy to post.  I guess you always hear how tiring it is, but it’s one of things that only once you experience it can you finally understand it.  As I’ve heard many times lately, the days are long, but the years are short.  I can’t believe it’s been 7 weeks now since the Captain was born.

Tomorrow is Brennan’s “due date”, and he is now just over 8 pounds.  He will be 7 weeks, 1 day chronological, but 0 days adjusted tomorrow.  What do I mean, he will be 0 days adjusted?

For premature infants, they have two ages until about age two or three.  The first age is his chronological age – calculated from the day he was physically born, and when he will legally be allowed to gamble, vote, and drink alcohol (always responsibly, of course!).  The second age is his adjusted age (also called corrected age) – calculated from his original due date.

Typical developmental milestones for a preemie are viewed from their adjusted ages.  For Captain B, milestones such as rolling over, reaching for objects, sitting up, babbling, etc. will happen much later in his chronological development.  While a term child will begin sitting up between 4-7 months, for example, Captain B will begin this in 6-9 months based on his actual birth date (May 25).

Some characteristics will still develop partly from experience, such as the ability to eat (food in digestive tract speeds up its maturation), and familiarity with language due to earlier exposure.  But a general rule of thumb is that his development timeline will occur based on his adjusted age of July 14.

It’s really difficult to get others understand the difference sometimes, as they think a baby is just a baby.  I’m not saying B is “special”, but I think it’s basically hard for people to get the fact that we have had 7 weeks of abnormal bonus time to our parental experience.  It truly has only been the last few days as if CMO and I have felt like we had a regular baby, and we have been able to tell he’s acting more “normal” at last.  I use the term “normal” loosely, because every baby is different anyways, regardless of chronological maturation.  Some babies walk or talk sooner than others, just because of various biological and environmental factors.

The best analogy I have is thinking about how vastly different a 14 year old is from an 18 year old.  But as people mature, that same gap effectively closes as you get older.  There is little difference between a 60 and 64 year old, but obviously the difference between a 1 year old and 5 year old is much greater.  If you continue to think along those lines, two months difference at birth is a much larger magnitude than you have probably thought about.

There is no magic or scientific rule for when B will “catch up” exactly, but his noticeable chronological developmental delays should begin to smooth out around age two or three. B is most likely going to see slowest development in physical or motor skills, as preemies are weaker due to abnormalities of muscle tone that may make it longer for him to develop sitting up or rolling over skills.  At this point, only time will tell.

TLDR; You adjust a premature baby’s age based on his due date, and refer to that as his adjusted age for assessing development milestones, such as walking or talking, which makes B “born” tomorrow.