Independent mobility, take II

About a month ago, I posted a gripe about the fact that Hannah was still so limited in her mobility, even though she was getting around great in her walker. The transitions to/from her walker and from her walker to other places were not happening so she still needed a lot of assistance.

I guess I should post gripes more often because maybe the message goes out to the CP mobility gods and they snap into action, since now I can say that Ms Hannah's mobility has just taken off in the past few weeks. I'm thrilled!

First of all, she is pulling up to and at everything which is huge. She pulls up in her toddler bed (a safety concern but exciting nonetheless), she crawls to and pulls up into her walker, she crawls around the playroom and pulls up to the play table, and so on. It's so great! If she's doing something on the floor I can put her walker near here and leave the room and if she decides she wants to go somewhere else, she can. Her steering and control of the walker have taken off as well. She can get just about anywhere she wants on the first floor of our house, so her need to ask for help to access her toys is greatly reduced.

This is so wonderful to see and also very good timing because the girls will be enrolled in a pre-preschool program in July and then regular preschool in September, so knowing that Hannah is that much more able to get around her environment is very comforting to us.

It's hard to know how much of this is a developmental leap that would have happened anyway and how much is attributed to the botax, which we're going to do another round of in a few weeks. Some of the tightening is coming back in Hannah's hamstrings and adductors but overall she is still doing really well. Her doc feels like we should just keep going with the botax treatments while she's making these developmental strides so that she has every advantage she can to learn these new skills while her tone is reduced. The only place where her tone seems to be having a more dramatic affect which the botax didn't seem to relieve much is the turning in and dragging of her left leg, so this go-around she'll get 2 additional shots around her calf muscles to try to help with that. But I guess this is a muscle group we need to keep an eye on to see if she might require some kind of orthopedic surgery down the line.

We also got a hold of some teeny tiny forearm crutches for Hannah to try, which just happened to come in hot pink so that pretty much sealed the deal for her in terms of her willingness to give them a whirl. This will probably be pretty slow going, though: she's super motivated but I think is still a way from feeling comfortable bearing her weight on them. In addition, with my added bulk I don't feel like I can do all of the bending over that would be required to really practice diligently with her. Hopefully Daddy can do some of it and we'll just take it slowly right now. But it's exciting to think that maybe in the next year or so, hopefully before kindergarten, she will be using them instead of her big bulky walker.

So as always, our girl is on the move and keeping us on her toes!