Have you ever seen a baby wearing a cute little helmet and wondered why? So you’re out walking around and you come upon a cutey cute little baby and they have a helmet like thing on their head and you’re all, “Hey! I wonder what the deal is with that cutey cute little baby?”
I know. I thought the same thing! And then, we found out OUR cutey cute little guy, aka, “Bubby”, has to wear one of these “helmets” for a while to reshape his perfectly functioning little head. I’m here to share what we’ve learned. Obviously we’ve decided this is best for us right now, but I’m not saying this is the only way to go and everyone’s situation and needs are different. I’m just here again to share my experience, strength and hope and maybe you can share it along with me.
This is a Doc Band.
It’s custom fitted to our little guy after they do a 360 picture of him while he wears a tiny little stocking over his head like a burglar to see his head shape as he smiled the whole time. JUST KILL ME.
Everything is just fine, it’s just his head and some features are a bit assymetrical, due to having something called Plagiocephaly.
After I learned how to say that obnoxious big word – ok, I’m lying, I still totally don’t know how to say it – I FREAKED OUT. I obsessed over this at first and how awful it would be and that there could be ANYTHING wrong with him and I took it personally. VERY PERSONALLY. What did I do wrong? Did I not do enough fucking tummy time, because that shit is the bane of our existence, but we did it so often! I constantly adjusted his positions to try to get him to be more straight forward and not lean to one side, I made myself a bit crazy about it. Ahem.
Turns out, I did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG. I did everything right. I CARRIED TWINS TO 38 WEEKS and had perfectly healthy babies. However, there wasn’t quite as much space inside me because TWO BABIES – ONE BABY MAKER, and little Bubby was head down for a long time and that caused his precious little head to be a bit misshapen. NO BIG DEAL. You feel me? I have enough perspective to know this is NOTHING compared to the awfulness that some kids face. NOTHING. A blip on the radar. Gratitude abounds.
This is very common in multiples and in fact when we went to Cranial Technologies, Inc. the first time, there were two other sets of cutey cute twins there as well. WE ARE NOT ALONE. I have spoken to other moms about their experience and everyone has basically that same reaction. And we are wary and gun-shy of people staring and thinking something is terribly wrong. It looks kinda way worse than it actually is. The bands are very light and after a couple days, Bubby doesn’t seem to be bothered by it very much.
They wear the bands 23 hours a day, for a matter of weeks or months – we go in often to have it checked – with one hour off to wash his hair and snuggle for an hour and back on it goes. It’s almost purely cosmetic, however, jaw problems could occur later if we don’t do something now and DH and I didn’t want to risk that, so here we are.
Little Bubby is a trooper this week. He’s had to deal with mommy going to work, adjusting to new caregivers, milk in a bottle – AS IF! AND this helmet. You know what? He is doing FANTASTIC. I’m so proud of my little guy. As my husband says, we could have NOT done the band and chances are he would be just fine. HOWEVER if he gets older and something occurs due to this, he might be upset with us that we didn’t do more and that would be on us. So, we are doing this. And he is taking it all in stride like a gotdamn champion. The only repercussion right now seems to have been a bit of sleep disturbance, but last night he was back to sleeping about 11 hours straight. Other than that, he’s my super happy, smiley yet serious baby boy, as usual.
So, moral of this story is, this little boy is adjusting just fine to big changes in his life. His mommy is trying to follow his lead. And decide how we will decorate that bad boy. We are thinking racing stripes….
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Too Sober For This 