Question about timing with preemies

twodaisies

With term babies, there is always advice and discussions that tie into babies age - like timing for growth spurts, sleeping and tummy issues.  But how does that work with preemies?  Does it tend to follow actual age?  Adjusted age?  Or are we just a special snowflake of our own that doesn't follow any of the normal patterns?

KTZ17

Agree with PP that my DD never really had growth spurts or "wonder weeks," but she did definitely have sleep regressions and they followed when the moms on my BMB said their babies had them, so I'd say actual age.

Cst2CstBride

Special snowflake. In the beginning they are at the adjusted age, but at some point they start catching up and develop faster than their peers, so they get ahead of the adjusted age but behind their real age. From like 6 mo to one year when dd caught up, I had no idea how "old" she was. She was somewhere in the middle.

brachysira

Yeah, it's kind of a bummer, but "your baby, week by week" and similar just did not apply.  I'm fairly sure that even with term babies, you can't rely on that sort of exact timeline, but with DD, it was more intuition and observation that helped us figure out what was going on with her at any one time.  

carrotcake06

Cst2CstBride said:

Special snowflake. In the beginning they are at the adjusted age, but at some point they start catching up and develop faster than their peers, so they get ahead of the adjusted age but behind their real age. From like 6 mo to one year when dd caught up, I had no idea how "old" she was. She was somewhere in the middle.

This is true for us as well. For the twins, it seemed by 9mo they were hitting most things by actual age. But also, the typical ranges for milestones tend to spread out here too and since my boys were only 6w early, that range often encompassed both actual and adjusted.

For example, they both smiled at 12-13w actual / 6-7w adjusted. One crawled at 9mo actual / 7.5mo adjusted and the other at 9.5 mo actual / 8mo adjusted or so. That smiling milestone is clearly adjusted age while the crawling one could really be either.

Their big brother (FT/37w) smiled at 6w, sat at 5mo, crawled at 9mo, walked at 12-13mo, and didn't really have a lot of words until 20mo, so I often, and unfairly so, compare them to him.

ziggy903

Special snowflakes. They're all over the place.