August 31, 2009

Day #1

We made it through! Whitney did a great job today. She is still not quite sure about following direction but she smiled her way through the majority of the morning and cried the rest. (:

We began with a informational parent meeting. Whitney is in class with 2 other children and 2 conductors. One of the children has spina bifida and the other has cerebral palsy (CP). They are running two other classes as well for different age groups. It was fun to meet other parents and chat together. There are families from across the US from Michigan, Colorado, and even Alaska . We are so blessed to have this kind of therapy so close to us.

We began the morning pretty low key for the first session. The kids played together while the parent meeting went on and then we started. First we did some stretching playing peak-a-boo and other games to get us moving. Whitney stood with assistance and then we encouraged her to pull herself up onto her bench but she was not very interested, so I helped. Many exercises later we had potty time. Thankfully Whitney is well aware of the potty since we have incorporated it into our daily routine for the past several months. Our hope is that we can train her to empty her bladder so there fewer UTI's and to have as much continence as possible.

We then had a snack time as some need to work on eating/drinking and then we moved on to standing. Whitney is not very confident standing in her new Nike shoes. She bends over quite a bit. We are starting her holding onto a little chair and taking steps backwards to hlep straighten her knees. This takes two adults to help her get to the parallel bars! Did I mention I am getting workout as well? She made it there and she sat on our little stool by the parallel bar. One new exercise was for her to pick up her foot while sitting on her stool and smash a sponge of sorts. Needless to say she was not interested. I hope to tell you in a few weeks that she is stomping all over it. She did some assisted standing and then she became distracted by a toy and did not notice she was standing straight all by herself! I was pretty excited but had to hide my excitement for fear she would freak out. Crawling is another task we are trying to master. She currently army crawls but she did well not complaining too much today as she was encouraged to crawl correctly with assistance. We will see!

Needless to say it was a great day filled with hope for moving forward.

Summer

This is just a quick post to catch everyone up on the Nelson news from August. The first week we rented a cottage on lake Michigan. The girls had a great time playing in the sand and I was once again grateful that the brace is only on at night. We all browned up nicely and were able to get a little exercise too. There were 140 some steps going down to the beach. Thank goodness for my Ergo carrier for Whitney. I would not have made it down or up without it. The rest of the month sped by.

September starts with our first Conductive Learning Center (CLC) session called Parent and Child. This means that both Whitney and I will go there Monday -Friday from 9-12. One of my largest concerns was childcare for Fiona. Thankfully between Matt's mom and my sister-in-law we were able to cover all the days but 3.

Matt had the great idea to journal our month at the CLC daily so that we could 'watch' her developmental progress together. So, please bare with me through this next few weeks and pray with us that she is quick to learn and cooperate.