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!

Therapy Update

Speech

Ruby is rocking and rolling. I keep saying it, but she adds so many new words and blends all of the time. This means articulation suffers as she tries to keep up with her expanding vocabulary, but that's why we do so many hours of speech each week (to correct). She still does speech 2x/week at school as part of her day, and then she does speech once or twice a week with private therapists that focus on different parts of her articulation and blending. Ruby is stringing together thoughts to make toddler-esque sentences now; it is so cool!

PT/Aquatic Therapy

This is Ruby's favorite type of therapy. She LOVES the pool, she LOVES Miss Beth, and that means she LOVES Aquatic Therapy! Ruby is jumping all of the place now, which was our main goal when we started. She can jump from standing still, she can jump forward, she can jump off a curb, she can jump twice in a row (sometimes). For an hour each week Ruby and Miss Beth motor around the pool, sometimes with ankle weights, kicking (on her stomach, on her back, seated, on a kick board), maneuvering pool stairs, jumping up and down in different depths and on dry land, doing sit ups, balancing on one leg, balancing in the water on a noodle or Miss Beth's knee....it's an exhausting hour!

OT

This is Ruby's biggest struggle right now. We still haven't acquired private Occupational Therapy. She receives it 2x/week at school, and when she stays for the full day at school, the afternoon focuses on handwriting, which hits this area. That being said, when I work with her at home, my assessment is that her skills are still very lacking. Her control of crayons, pencils, etc. is not great at all, and even tracing straight lines is difficult, so the only letters she can at all form on her own are "O" and "X". And those are not on a specific writing line, but wherever on the paper she lands. We are tackling that harder than ever at home right now. We do a lot of thera-putty, cutting, using utensils to pick up objects...that girl works hard!

Therapy Updates

It's been a while...my blogging takes a hit when we get busy. And, as humans, we get busy.

Ruby is still rocking and rolling at the local public school special needs pre-K. She loves her school, but she has become a little too comfortable as certain less-than-desirable behaviors are often present. Mostly it is not sitting/staying put during story time and not maintaining her personal space. We are working on it. (Story of our life!)

Aquatic Therapy
Ruby loves it. We started this a few months ago, but had some hiccups with Medicaid and insurance. We are back now though, and Ruby couldn't be happier. For those that don't know (I didn't), Aquatic Therapy can be used for PT, OT, speech...you name it. For Ruby, it's mostly PT, but also a little OT. She and her therapist move around the pool, using platforms and ankle weights and a variety of squeeze toys to engage core muscles and use the water for resistance and also balance support. After just one session I noticed some improvement in Ruby stepping over structures/thresholds. And just this week she jumped with two feet simultaneously (while waist-high in the water, on the platform) for the first time EVER. I have spent countless hours working with her on this skill on trampolines and curbs and all raised structures...who knew water was the answer!

Speech
Rock-n-roll. Ruby's speech is not clear, but her vocabulary is growing daily. And she strings words together so much now! Her latest and my favorites are:

• "Got it" (Ruby says this when she is working on something and you try to help her..."I got it".)
• "faster" (Ruby says this when you push or pull her down the hill in a wheeled mode of transportation.)
• "Caffee" (This is what she calls my mom. The big kids call her 'Grandma Cathie', but Ruby obviously feels that is a big formal because while she can say a version of 'grandma', she intentionally drops it for my mom.)
• "Baby. Want read? Ok."(This is an example of the conversations she has with her baby dolls and stuffed animals around the house while I'm making dinner.)

OT
At school Ruby works with an Occupational Therapist twice a week on specific tasks related to fine motor skills. She is getting so much better at controlling a writing instrument (usually a big crayon) to loosely trace lines and make round shapes. She is also stacking blocks and stringing beads with much more control and skill.