When your child is born with a congenital heart defect, your world gets turned upside down. Your days are spent learning new lingo, a different heart anatomy, and you're keeping an eye on many different points of data. When you're finally able to come home from the hospital, it can feel scary to suddenly not have your child hooked up to monitors and have 24/7 access to nurses and doctors. That's where this journal comes in! As a CHD parent myself, I felt the need to have some sort of control over a situation where I found myself having to surrender most of the decisions about my daughter's care to a team of cardiac experts.

This journal allows you to easily track most of the things your child's cardiologist will want to know on a regular basis--weight gain, how feeding is going, diapers, heart rate, O2 saturations, and respiratory rate. There are also sections in the journal to allow you keep track of appointments, notes, and questions you don't want to forget to ask your the care provider. There's also a medicine schedule that you can cut out to hang on your fridge to help you keep track of any medications your child may be on.

Another benefit of this journal is that it's not just useful for your cardiologist visits--it's great for bringing to any other doctor visits your child may have! I found it useful to bring with us to the pediatrician, the GI doctor for her feeding tube, and the pulmonologist for her RSV injections. It's a great way to help keep all of your information in one place!