What She Ate: For lunch, baked potato soup and I topped it with some shredded cheddar and sliced green onions. For dinner I visited my parents and my dad made me a toasted sandwich with ham, salami, and mozzarella on this divine, airy bread.
Warning: This is going to be a long update on Charlie's therapies. Feel free to come back tomorrow if it's not your thing.
Today was Charlie's six month review with our parish's Early Intervention Program, Early Steps. He's been in the program just a tad more than five months, but we're eager to add Physical Therapy, so we moved it up as far as we could.
First, we did a questionnaire based on age to see where the deficits are. In a word, everywhere, but that's no surprise. I'll break it all down for you and tell you our plan of attack.
First, gross motor. Before, we were very, very behind. We didn't even show up on the chart. Now, we are barely behind. We are behind, but we've gained serious ground. It's taken a lot of hard work, though, and now we're going to be getting a physical therapist once a week! I am SO excited. I think the plan is to work on sitting with a toy in hand, rolling more, and holding the crawl position.
Next, fine motor. This is mostly feeding and we are very far behind in this. This is no surprise since I hate solid food and have made very little effort. Guess what? Time to get moving. Our OT is going to be focusing on finger foods, chewing, and drinking from a cup. The only strength we have in this area is that he attempts to hold the bottle and is occasionally successful. Within the next six months our OT would like us to work on solids, drinking from a cup, and eating some table foods. Yikes. I guess I can't keep my baby a baby forever.
We didn't do very well on social/personal, but this is largely due to his inability to touch his toes. I think that if his hamstrings weren't so tight then he would be trying to grab them. His OT said that she thinks social is one of his strengths. I couldn't agree more. (My brother called with a question, so let me clear it up: Personal mean awareness of self. Charlie is fine with social. He may be aware of himself, but he should be showing an interest in his feet and he's not--it could just be a tone thing or it could mean that he hasn't noticed yet that he has feet).
He doing great in "problem solving." Like my husband said, he's not doing any differential Calculus, but he's completely normal in this area ( I'm not doing differential Calculus either).
As I've been saying, we'd like him to play with his toys more with his hands. For this, we're getting a Special Instructor who will come once a week to work on this and other pre-academic skills. I don't remember what area this correlates to--I'll have to look at the paperwork when they send it to me.
Lastly, we talked about speech. As I suspected, he has fallen behind in speech. I think it probably has a lot to do with the fact that I haven't been pushing the feeding thing too much--same muscles and all. Anyway, we're going to have a speech therapist twice a month for that. I am extremely interested to see what she recommends.
So, we've got OT, PT, and a Special Instructor once a week. We've got Speech twice a month, and we've got Vision therapy once a month. The kid's got five teachers and he's only eight months old.
I'm excited, though. Call me a dork but I can't wait to work on all these new things.
