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.