January 6th, 2012 - Zachary is now 4 years old.

As anyone with a premie can tell you we worry about the future. When will our son/daughter catch up to their peers? Physically, emotionally, mentally... Well I can happily say that Zachary is now taller than some of his almost 5 year old friends. He's a bit too smart for his own good and doing very well overall. We don't have any sight problems, hearing issues or any other premie related issues at this time. He has a fairly decent attention span for a kid his age and in some cases better than I would expect.

Zachary loves Legos, robotics, trucks, trains and playdoh. He always wants to get up on a chair when we're in the kitchen so he can help us cook. He loves to clean (dunno why but he thinks it's fun lol). He reminds me a lot of my dad and you can tell he's very mechanically inclined. Sometimes we have to pry the electronics from his hands but I figure that's an issue most parents go through in this day and age. Trying to get kids focused on playing outside or with their other non electronic ton of toys is always a struggle.

As far as academics he's doing great. He can count to 30, write his numbers up to 12. He knows all the uppercase letters and most lowercase. He can write all the letters. We've been trying to work on phonics with him as of late but he's not getting the sound similarities as well. He could just need more time. It's not good to push kids into reading as they will have a harder time due to frustration and often won't read until past Kindergarten. So we go slow with that and I often will switch between reading and math. We're just starting adding and he's doing better with that each time we work on it. Bribery works well with Zach lol, I guess with anything the trick is to find what motivates them (kid or adult).

These days he wants to stay up all night and each evening it's often a fight to get him to go to sleep. I swear he thinks he's going to miss something if he stays up. All par for the course with a high energy kid who is so full of life. v We've had a few friends lately who'd had premie babies and I hope Zach can be an inspiration to them on their journey. I also hope this blog has helped other premie parents who may be looking for a little hope along the way where there often is little except statistics in medical reports.

Hope everyone has a great 2013 and as I have anything interesting to report with Zach I'll happily share.