All Things Haley: Year In The Life #18

Everyone loves therapy...particularly Miss Gracie! That little one absolutely adores Caleb's physical therapist. Whenever she comes over and has Caleb in front of her working with him, Grace will run over, squeeze in between them, sit in her lap, and lounge there until someone stops the madness. I let it go on for a little while today once, because it was just so cute, but when the therapist finally nearly dropped Caleb from a standing position because Grace was getting in the middle, I decided that Grace doesn't need the therapy.

We had the occupational therapist come over today for the second time! I'm not so sure about her yet...but I think we may be spoiled with such an awesome physical therapist. The OT started out really focusing on Caleb's thumb usage, but after an hour of frustration trying to get past his pulling away/turning away/fussing, she gave up. She decided that getting him to pick things up with a pincher grasp is too aggressive of a goal right now. We are going to step back a bit and focus on trying to get him to do larger movements with an open palm instead of his thumbs being tucked in. So we'll work on hitting the big ball with an open palm or pushing things with an open palm. She also wants him to start wearing splints on his wrists and hands to hold his thumb out. She's concerned about him wearing a hard splint because it seems like he has some low sensory there, so he might not let us know if the hard splint was giving him blisters, etc (he really fights having his thumbs out sometimes, so he'd probably be pushing his thumb pretty hard against the splint which would cause the blisters). Of course, the soft splint won't work as well because he pushes his thumbs in so hard sometimes...but she thought that even a few minutes of feeling what it's like to function with thumbs out would be helpful.

I'm skeptical. I asked her to check on his benefits...if it's free, sure, we'll try it for a while. But if we have to pay a lot for something like that, I'd hate to just experiment. I'm also concerned about him becoming reliant on things like this, on leg braces. We're still good with orthotics for his feet for now, but whenever we take his shoes off, his ankles turn in and down so badly that I'm worried we might need to move to braces at some point. The least invasive option is definitely where I want to go...but I also want it to work. It's a tough balance. I just want him to be free from "support" like that in the future, so any use of it now could make it harder to reach that goal.

Then again, without the support now, he might not learn the right way to use his body...making it harder in the future anyway.

Quite the conundrum.

In any case, the babies were pretty spent after two straight hours of therapy for Caleb and being pulled away and trapped in pack n plays and out of the play room for Grace. Caleb has been acting super tired over the last few days and actually slept almost twelve hours straight last night! I'm wondering if it's the teething that's making him tired...or maybe he's growing. I just hope he's not sick!

We're going to start taking pictures of some of the therapy exercises and activities to help us remember the techniques. We're also starting a new practice of video taping his current movement and technique so we can compare the changes over time! I'm excited to do some more documenting :)