Therapy has been going awesome for Conner. He took pretty much the whole month of March off of everything because we just couldn't do it all with me having a c-section, having a new baby in the house, visitors all the time and then me getting sick. It was just too much. But Conner is a great patient (in my opinion) and has been making great strides in therapy.
His speech has taken off. When he turned three, he only had single words, and not very many of them. Now, he is having complete conversations and his language has caught up to typical kids of the same age. It is incredible how far he has come. Now we are working on intelligibility (ability for others to understand him) and some concepts. We are thrilled with how far he has come. I never thought it would happen because it was such slow progress. I love having conversations with Conner and he says the best things. He cracks us up. He is so creative and imaginative. He turns everything in to a rocket ship and makes it blast off. He is still very social and loves playing with his friends from school and regularly requests a trip to their houses. He is still going to Children's for speech therapy twice a week and to the public school once a week for speech. A few weeks ago, Conner started Beaumont's speech preschool. He is going there one morning a week and over the summer, we are going to send him two mornings a week. There are only 5 kids in his class, a teacher and a speech therapist. We have been very happy with it so far. They work on kindergarten readiness (the kids are 3-5 years) so he is working on lots of useful stuff. They do a little fine motor and gross motor work too, so overall it is a great program for him. In just 3 weeks, they said Conner has gone from pretty much silent to being a chatterbox. Conner talks much more when he is comfortable with the environment (like at home, he talks non-stop!).
Conner's fine motor skills still have a long way to go. He has a very hard time with simple fine motor tasks. Yesterday, his therapist taped up three of his fingers so he could only use his thumb and forefinger. She did it at 1 p.m. and he made me leave it on the rest of the day (I had to rip it off at 6 and he cried). I think the bandage made it easier for him to isolate the fingers he wanted to use. I wish we had tried this sooner. Hopefully this will help and we can come up with different exercises to do with different fingers. Conner has the most difficulty with weight bearing on his arms (push up style activities). He doesn't mind the activities where he is pulling or pushing with his arms, but when he has to hold his weight on his arms, he resists. His arms/shoulders/hands are very weak and it seems that no matter how hard he works, they are not getting stronger. This affects his fine motor control greatly. If he can't get better control of his hands naturally, I'm hoping we can find some adaptive stuff to use for school. Overall though, he is doing excellent in OT too. He is seriously an awesome kid!
PT is going well too. Conner is still working on jumping...it's a work in progress and has been for a while. He wants to do it so bad but just can't get any air. Once he masters jumping, then next is hopping! I don't go back with him any more, so I don't get to see what they are doing but I know he's doing a great job!
Conner started hippotherapy again 2 weeks ago as well. He is loving it even more than before. He gets to help shovel poop, put it in the wheelbarrow and put it in the "poop machine". He has also had the chance to feed the horses too and help take them out to the pasture. He loves going to the farm and I'm pretty sure that he wants his next birthday party at the same place as last year. We have given him several options, but all he wants is the farm! I'm so glad that he loves horses and he is getting therapy and having so much fun at the same time. He doesn't even need us when he's there. He doesn't look for help any more, doesn't want to even get off at the end. It's such a great experience for him and we are lucky we found such an awesome therapist.
So overall, we are very happy with how Conner is doing in therapy. He has a very busy schedule on Tuesdays and Thursdays but he does great with it. I think he is just so used to it. I don't know if we will ever get to a time when he doesn't need it, but if we do, I don't know what we will do with all the free time!
Next post...school...then maybe a fun post (we do have a little fun too!), i have a ton of catching up to do!
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