A starting point...

For those of you who haven't been following Mental Mother, or speaking to me in person, let me catch you up a bit.

Our daughter Ella is currently 1 year old, and has some developmental delays. A lot of this blog, for the time being, is going to be involved in communicating her progress to friends and family.

She's been evaluated by the local early intervention program sponsored by the school system. The evaluation shoes she has some developmental delays, most significantly in gross motor development (ie: skills involving large movements of the body like crawling, walking, etc). She also has a less substantial delay in communication skills (the ELAP test winds up placing the delays in multiple categories, however the cause of all of them would appear to be communication. See mental mother for more details on this)

Her fine motor development is fine and tested as age appropriate. For her age she has a good "pincer grasp" and hand-eye coordination, etc. Ella also tested fine in cognitive development and problem solving skills. Also, baring being tired, she is quite sociable and enjoys playing with people. There is occasional stranger anxiety, but she generally plays with "strangers" if we're nearby and are calm.

Although not definite, as only time will tell, based on the above Ella's delays are probably not the result of any major disorders. (ie: she's got good cognition and problem solving, so she's probably not mentally retarded, add in her sociable nature and she's not likely on any severe part of the autistic spectrum. Her fine motor development suggests there's no broad palsy or cerebellum issues.)

Thus far she has been responding very well to her current therapy sessions for gross motor development. We've met with a with a physical therapist 3 times, including her assessment visit, but even at the initial assessment the PT left us with some suggested activities to work on.

In general, Ella has good strength development, and to quote the PT "many good building blocks" for gross motor skills, but several other basic skills are missing.

Prior to starting, some of the building blocks Ella already had are: Standing while holding onto things, rolling onto her side to grab toys (but never a full roll, nor a roll off of the stomach), and grabbing onto your hands and using them to pull herself up to sitting.

Right at the start of her eval, but before we'd worked with the PT, she also learned to:
- extend the pulling up on your hands to pull herself up, stiff-legged, into a standing position.
- while sitting, if you put your hands on her shoulder blades and braced her from flipping over backwards she could push herself up to standing with leg power alone. However, even faced with something to grab onto, she'd leave her hands at her sides.

(Neither of those is a useful skill alone, but if you combine them...)

Thus far we have been working on the following things with the PT:

1) Rolling. Ella originally rolled both ways on-time, but stopped shortly after she started. Very quickly she regained the ability to roll if you simply moved one hand into the right place (in front of her, and slightly off-center towards the opposite side.) Recently she started doing this without our help.

2) Deeply bending over to reach toys. We've been teaching Ella how to pull one foot in so she's sitting in a "figure 4" so she can bend deeply to extend her reach from sitting.

3) Tolerating "tummy time" - Ella has always hated being on her stomach. We're now doing things to help her not immediately become upset if placed on her stomach. Little things like always putting her down on her stomach, even if we roll her over right away. This appears to be working well. Even though she still sometimes immediately objects to being on her stomach, she does now generally tolerate it, at least for a little while (ie: 1 minute), and sometimes for more extended periods (ie: 15-20 minutes).

4) Pulling up to standing from an elevated seat. If you sit "Indian style" on the floor and sit Ella on your knee with her feet on the floor, she can grab onto an object nearby and pull herself up to standing. We started off aiding her by bouncing her a bit, but she can now do this with no aid.

5) Kneeling. We're spending time getting her used to playing while kneeling, as this get her used to a position that is important in a lot of transition movements. She seems to do fine with this, although she does eventually tire of it.

6) "plopping" to sit - This is mostly an exercise in getting Ella to realize that not all forms of falling from standing are painful. I've been successful with this a few times, but most attempts result in her resisting by "stiff-boarding" her back or pulling herself back up to stand.

7) shifting from lying down to sitting. This is also one we're still working on. The idea is you tuck one foot up under their butt, and grab their shoulder and sit them up and over it. Today, I was playing around with Ella's feet working on crawling oriented skills. I had pushed her foot up near her butt, intending to put both there and shift her onto her knees. At that point she walked her self up with her hands and got into the sitting position without any help other than my placement of her foot.

Side note for humor: Amidst my research on delays, autism, etc, I found a self-test for Asperger's Syndrome (one of the autism spectrum disorders that is closest to full classic autism). An "average" person scores 16, mathematically inclined folks tend to score a bit over 20, and people with autism tend to score over 32. I scored a 25. I guess that means I'm nerdy, but just an ordinary nerd :)

http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=1982215450153908026

Anyway, g'nite all.