Physical Therapy

I've been contemplating on whether to post about this or not. I finally decided that, yes, I need to talk about this. This is nothing to be ashamed of, and it does not mean that anything is "wrong" with Haley. Most of you probably know that Haley is a little on the "slow" end of development. We all kinda make light of it by saying "oh, she's just a little lazy" or "what a diva, she wants everything brought to her". In most cases, not crawling is fine, in fact some kids never do crawl, they go straight from sitting to walking. She doesn't crawl, scoot, roll, camando crawl, anything. She makes not attempts at mobility what so ever. The fact that she is totally immobile is the problem, it is not normal for a child to just sit and not attempt to move. She should be driving me absolutely insane moving around getting into things. I used to think of this as a blessing in disguise. She also doesn't stand. Whether it is on her own, or with support. Another problem.

I have been cautiously watching her for the past few months thinking she will develop at her own pace, that I can't force her to do anything. Both of which are true assumptions about child development. But my last straw came 2 weeks ago. She was sitting at this toy that her Uncle Matthew gave her for Christmas. Its one of those that is meant to grow with a child's developmental stages. You can sit and play with it, stand and play with the things on top, or cruise along the entire thing. Well, she was just sitting trying to reach the monkey that plays music and lights up (its her favorite part of the whole thing) and its about 3-4 inches out of her reach. She sat there sobbing, reaching, and rocking trying to figure out how to get to it, but she just couldn't. The frustration on her face was almost unbearable. It just broke my heart to see her struggling like that.

I talked with my friend Meredith who is a pediatric nurse practitioner and she was concerned about her, so I called and got an appointment with the pediatrician. He has always told me that she is a little on the slow end, but not to worry, it will all even out by the time she is 18 months old. I couldn't just sit and wait until she was 18 months old and see if it did in fact "even all out". I'm not blaming him at all for not showing concern earlier. He only sees her for 30 minutes at a time every three months. There is no way for him to get the whole picture of what she does on a day to day basis. He gave us a referral to a physical therapist and we went for the first time this morning.

She did really well today. She didn't mind at all letting a stranger hold her. She was just as sweet and friendly as she could be. The therapist kept commenting on how social she was. She did a full evaluation of her motor skills, and did find some problems that needed to be worked on. She will go over the results of her "report" next week, but said that she had some pretty significant delays in gross motor skills, her hip muscle tone, and some reflexes. She is also referring us to an occupational therapist to help with things like her hands grips and upper body strength. It sounds like this will be a slow process and will take some time. For this week we are to work on the very basics like rolling over and getting into a crawling stance. It just occured to me that part of the problem may be that I've been encouraging her to do more advanced things and she never mastered the basics. I have faith that she is and will be okay, she just needs a little extra help. And there is nothing wrong with asking for help when it is needed is there??!!

So, I will, as usual, keep you posted on Haley's progress.