Therapy update

I haven't talked much recently about Natalie's progress with gross motor and fine motor. In the past week or two, she's become more consistent in rolling to her belly, and spends a little more time playing on her belly. She has made a few crawling moves forward, maybe once or twice, so we're working to encourage that before she starts rolling everywhere. :) Natalie sits very well, but sometimes still falls backwards when she gets tired. The good improvement is that she protects herself by putting her hands behind her, so sometimes I find her halfway back with her arms behind her, hands on the floor. Her PT is working on rolling, crawling, getting from sitting to lying position, and getting from lying to sitting position.

Natalie's OT works on fine motor skills. Natalie is pretty quick to pick up things now (before, all her movements were very slow...ie, 5 seconds from the time she started to move her arm until she actually touched an object). She loves to bang two blocks together, now her OT is working to get her to bang down on something in front of her (she comes close when banging on the xylophone). She loves to take blocks out of a box and put them back in. Natalie has been picking up Gerber puffs and putting them in her mouth, and now she's chewing enough to give her Cheerios, so that's another item she can practice with. She also practices pulling things and transferring things from one hand to the other.

The oddities that we are trying to overcome/train away are: throwing her arms back--whether she's on her belly or sitting--and using both hands the same way at the same time (ie, if one hand opens to pick up a block, the other hand opens at the same time, so the block that was in it drops). Both of these are very common in kids with this syndrome. It seems that some kids still have the problems, but we are hoping that Natalie's excellent therapists will be able to coax her to leave those habits behind.

We finally got insurance authorization for the swallow study, and it's been scheduled for April 26. We're praying that the study shows that she is safe to drink thin liquids. It is likely that even if our prayers are answered in this way, she will continue swallowing therapy for a little while longer to strenthen her swallow, but we hope the end is near for swallowing therapy.