Therapy Update

I have been bad, bad, bad about blogging since the beginning of school. What can I say...busy times!

Speech
This girl.

She is such a chatter box! Ruby's speech continues to grow, with her spontaneous speech improving daily. We are in a season where I get comments from friends like "I can't believe how much she's talking!" or "She's talking so much." And these are people who see her a few times a month at least! I recently started going back through a large stack of sight word flash cards with Ruby. While in the hospital, we would go through them daily. My focus then was not for her to read them as much as mimic me saying them. At best, there were 10-12 that she could say (repeating after me) with enough intelligibility for someone else to know what she was saying. When we picked those cards up last week, I realized that she repeats every one after me, and only a few are hard to recognize. (This stack is at least 50-cards deep.)

This made me realize how far we've come in the last two years. Not only is she speaking more, but she is doing so spontaneously (without being directly by me, or without repeating after me) and she is able to repeat anything I give her. When you are in the early stages of speech therapy, you are often measuring success by how many words your child has. For a long time that was a single digit number: the total words Ruby could say, repeated or spontaneous. If I think about it now, Ruby's word measure is infinite. If I pull out 100 cards and say the word first, she will repeat 100 of those words back to me.

This. Is. Amazing. And oh-so encouraging.

PT/Aquatic Therapy

Still Ruby's favorite hour of the week! We missed Aquatic Therapy for a month recently due to school breaks and scheduling issues, but when we returned, Ruby's therapist was excited and surprised to see how much stronger she had gotten in that month (instead of losing skills/muscle). This speaks loudly to the benefits of being in a school environment that allows for free-time on the playground for recess. My girl runs (and runs and runs) and climbs the whole time she is outside, and it is really paying off!  

Ruby can now jump with two feet, getting actual air under her feet. And she likes to jump all of the time. She has jumped in succession (two or more times in a row), but that skill is still emerging. She has jumped over obstacles (pool noodle height or smaller), but that still is still emerging too.

OT
Just this week I am starting to see some improvements in this area. Hallelujah!! Ruby just started to show interest/ability in coloring inside of the lines and is working on that skill. FINALLY this week she started tracing some lines/shapes/letters for me with success. She has been able to trace a line going straight down for a while, and I know she gives them a little more accuracy at school, but at home we have been struggling with this one. (One afternoon she even traced an "R" with crazy accuracy!) And yesterday when we were coloring in the afternoon, she kept readjusting her crayon to hold it correctly (unprompted). This is crazy cool.

And her scissor skills are improving too. Straight lines through the entire paper? Yes, please!