Updates

Sweety and Smarty both had their six-month therapy evaluations this week and the news is good:

Sweety's obviously not going to lean to crawl in a functional manner. Apparently he's decided that cruising furniture and taking a few steps between chairs and couches is a much more efficient way to get around. (who can blame him? I have to agree.) That's okay. Eventually we'll be able to reason with him, and turn crawling into a game, so that he can still receive the benefits of learning to crawl. (shoulder and knee strength, depth perception, cross-brain interaction)

So for now, we're working on balance and improving transitions between laying, sitting, standing, etc. We're also going to start working on simple instructions like: please give that to me, please clap your hands, please stop pulling my hair, etc.

As for speech, he has several good syllables in his repertoire, but our ST wants to see those connected to his play more often. Also, he has two solid words besides mama and dada. He signs 'please' and says "mah, mah" for 'more.' Our ST wants to increase that to five words in the next six months, and if they're going to be signed words, she wants some kind of utterance to accompany them. I think we can do more than five, but we'll see.


Smarty has worked really hard, and it is paying off. In fact, he barely even qualifies for therapy at this point! Our goals for the next six months seam almost silly compared to previous evaluations!

His speech has improved beyond my craziest hopes. He conquers the longest sentences and most complicated words, but he still has trouble with the flow of his sentences. He speaks disjointedly, pausing between syllables, and he doesn't always have much inflection (ie: raising the pitch of the voice at the end of a question) or puts the wrong inflection in the wrong spot. So there's that to work on, but it's pretty nit-picky.

He's also still a tiny behind socially. He interacts and relates well with adults, but he's still a little intimidated by peers. We will be encouraging him to invite his friends to drive cars or play house or whatever, and to respond better to such invitations from others.


But that's it! His small and large motor skills are all at least on the low end of average, many are near the middle, and as always, his cognitive development is way ahead of the game! You're awesome kid; keep it up!