Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Football Season & Dominic

With football season rapidly approaching, I've been getting rather excited.  I am a huge college football fan, follower of the Seahawks, and put in far too much effort maintaining fantasty teams.  However, this football season will be a little different for us.  First, it'll be our first full football season with three of us at home.  Dominic was born in November of last year, so he was around for a couple of games.  He just didn't get overly excited about them... or notice them.  The other reason things will be different is that one of us will be wearing some new gear for a while.

Dominic's head from the top down
Being the overly protective parents we are, we've been watching out for Dominic on all sorts of things.  Sterilizing every single bottle, slowly testing out new foods, and repeatedly checking for developmental milestones.  On many fronts, he has done extremely well.  His favorite syllable is "da" (we're still working hard on "pa" though).  He officially has 3 teeth with at least 3 more about to come through.  He can sit up, roll all over the place, stand up with help, and nearly crawl.

The only thing that has had us worried has been his head shape.  Despite our best efforts, his overall head shape has ended up being asymmetrical.  The image to the left shows some laser scanned images that were developed to analyze his head shape.  Looking at Dominic in person, his hair is growing in well enough that it really conceals the imbalance, but the images here show a mild to moderate slant.

Overall, this is not a major issue long-term.  As parents though, we want to correct his head shape now while he is still growing since it is not self-correcting.  To make that happen, he's getting some snazzy new head gear that we're calling his helmet.

Helmet view from the front
Helmet view from the left side
The helmet itself is pretty simple.  The concept is that it is sculpted to focus the future growth in areas that will round out his head shape.  Other areas will be held in place by the helmet allowing those "future growth" areas to catch up.

With football season rapidly approaching, Andy and I may be tempted to add one bright red "N" sticker and another "ND" sticker to each side of the helmet so that Dominic will always ready to go for game days!