Mason updates

Hmm...where to begin?

With Torticollis. Which is what Mason was born with. It just means that on one side of his neck the muscles didn't develop properly because of how he was hanging out in the womb. This caused one side to be tighter than the other, causing him to have a tendency to "look" to the right whenever he was laying down. We noticed it very shortly after he was born because Aidan had it too.

 I guess we can totally blame my shortness and the fact that these poor kids had no room in the womb to stretch out causing this mess.

With Aidan it was a relatively easy fix. We would stretch his neck to the opposite side and eventually he started looking both ways on his own.

Mason has been a much tougher nut to crack.

The pediatrician had pointed it out at Mason's 1 month visit, long after Ryan and I had already noticed it. It was already starting to cause a flat spot on the back of his head because he was always laying on that side, even though Ryan and I had been proactively turning his head to the left whenever we saw him looking to the right.

She said if we didn't have it under control by the 2 month visit that we could contact Early Intervention and get a physical therapist that would come to the house to work on his neck with us.

Well, like I said Mason is a stubborn kid (Nooooo idea where he gets that from) and would fight us turning his head left at every chance he got. In the summer when we would take nightly walks I would try and jam a receiving blanket next to his head to try and keep him from turning it back to the right. Totally didn't work, he would just smoosh his face into it. I would sneak in while he was sleeping, turn his head, and then check on him 30 mins later and it was right back to the other side.

AAAH frustrating!

So anyway by the time his 2 month visit came, the flat spot on the back of his head was much worse, so we decided to call Early Intervention to get some help. By this time his hair was starting to come in pretty good and you could see that the spot where he always lays has almost no hair compared to the rest of his head.

It took almost 8 weeks just to get them to our house for an evaluation, and another 2 weeks from that point to even get a Physical Therapist to our house to work with us.

Once our therapist started coming she mentioned she was concerned that the pressure on the flat spot on the back of his head had created a slight bulge to form on his forehead. She mentioned he might need a helmet to help correct that but since it was so minimal she wasn't sure. So she called the Orthotist in Allentown and he offered to measure his head, and then measure it in another month to see if it was getting any better.

So we went for our consultation and it turns out that his poor little head is more misshapen that it actually looks. He said we could still wait a month and measure him again, but I could tell he didn't think anything would change. 

SO I decide right then and there that we were going to go forward with the helmet to help Mason have a nice round dome for the rest of his life. 

Sure, people at the grocery store will stare. People will wonder "what's wrong" with him, but I don't care. He'll have a nice round normal head later on in life and hopefully he will thank us for it.

He went on Tuesday to get a mold made of his head with plaster. I wanted to take pictures so Ryan was going to come along and help out, but Aidan spiked a fever that day so Ryan stayed home with him instead.

They put a sock over his head and put the plaster on in 2 pieces, and let it dry. The whole thing took maybe 10-15 minutes total. Not long at all, and Mason did really good, he grunted a lot but didn't actually start crying until about 30 seconds before the guy was done. Not bad considering he said most babies let out blood curdling screams throughout the whole process.

My buddy is a trooper though. :)

SO it will come in the week after Thanksgiving, and he will have to wear it for 3 months. We ordered it in Camo, so he'll be jut a little bit cooler, and hey, maybe we'll let Aidan put some stickers on it for him too.

Stay tuned for Double H's pics coming soon! (Double H stands for Helmet Head hahaha)

"You're going to make me wear what?"