20% Fixed

Last week Silas and I went to the doctor to get his helmet adjusted and we found out his head is 20% better!  At Rebound, they measure his head from the left front to the back right and then the front right to the back left and take the ratio of the two.  Right now he's at a 12 and he was at a 18 before.  A perfect head would be zero, meaning the dimensions would be the same.  We can already see a difference in the shape of his head, but there is still a ways to go.

Silas doesn't seem to mind wearing the helmet but it still seems to bother him at night.  He wakes up more often now than he did before the helmet.

One thing we noticed is that when you take the helmet off, he is a much happier baby.  He starts smiling and then touches his head. He really likes when you rub his head - if he were a cat, I'd swear he'd start purring.  All in all, the helmet is doing its job and we have at least a month and a half left. 

One week down

Silas has been in his cranial cap for over a week now and seems to be adjusting to wearing it. We have had a couple hicups.
The morning that he wore it to daycare made me laugh. As soon as I sat him down to talk to the teacher in his room, another kid crawled over to him and started to play with the helmet. Guess its something new. At times I catch Silas reaching his arms up and playing with the velcro strap.

Earlier this week daycare called because Silas had a 101.6 fever.  Since he had the helmet on, they couldn't tell that he had a fever when they were holding him.  His face doesn't touch you when you're holding him.  It wasn't until they changed him that they realized he was warm.  Once they called me to let me know that I needed to come pick him up, they took the helmet off. 

By the time I got him into the doctor he hadn't been wearing the helmet for a couple hours.  His temperature was back down to 98. It seemed that the helmet was radiating his heat back and made his mild fever warmer.

He was doing really well sleeping with the helmet on, but the last couple nights he would get up more than every two hours and then would cry when I tried to put him back to sleep.  Silas has been a great baby up to this point and never really cries. I don't want to blame his fussiness on the helmet entirely because he is teething as well.  It could be one of those two things.  Since he was born, he has been a great sleeper.  We decided to try taking the helmet off and he slept great. We don't want to get in the habit of taking it off when he cries. As soon as the helmet came off he was happy and smiling. I hope its him teething that's making him unhappy and not the helmet.  This could be a long couple of months....

I imagine that the helmet is uncomfortable like when we all had braces.  It hurt for awhile after getting them adjusting, you'd take some Advil, and then be fine. I'm not really sure what I can do to help with the discomfort except hold him. I'm sure it does hurt if his head is pressing against one part already and shifting the plates around.  Like any mother, I don't like when my baby is in pain.