So much to do, so little time!

Anxiety on the receding level means action on the mommy level. Grief is still there, depression is lurking behind (in a shadow, obviously) and anxiety still has me grinding teeth and thinking stupid thoughts while missing other thoughts of greater value, but the energy to do the things of family living is returning to our family life. Luckily, I still don't have a job, though it seems possible in the future. I keep telling friends I cannot fathom how I ever had a full-time, high-intensity job AND cared for kids and home and did all that therapy for Hannah, lived with a depressed and slow moving husband (in secret he may have been speedy, I am still not sure) and...!!!...then started on therapy for me, then spousal suicide and then more therapy for Claire, then me...then arrgghhh...then I remember that I was propped up with oxycodone from November 2010 to March 2013. And then propelled by PTSD, grief, sobriety and the need to eventually get better, then ... .... .... PRESTO! I now operate at roughly 65% and climbing of who I used to be before I married a depressed! lying! manipulative! wrongly made! sort of beautiful in a flawed but beautiful manly and deeply fucked up manly way kind of man and had children with him and eventually had all my own previous flaws and insecurities meet up with special needs! Depression of self plus spouse! Life threatened babies! Death of a parent (and beloved dog)! Life in a CAPITAL L Sense, plus regular life and fell the fuck apart. Boom. Did I mention BOOM!? So now, I figure 65% operational skills is not bad, considering. People say you need a year for grief, you need a year to get equilibrium in recovery, and obviously you need a year plus for PTSD due to its earth shattering and ass kicking nature. So sixteen months since spousal death, this is not bad, not bad at all. Except ALL. Kinda bad still, honestly, but not AS bad as before. A win!

We live to fight the good fight, and smile a little today. Knowing there are more smiles tomorrow and beyond.

In the last two weeks I have spent 40 hours or so pulling weeds, been social repeatedly on as many as four days in a row, volunteered at church, co-parented other peoples' kids as well as my own, gone to continued therapy, sorted the detritus of about the last two plus years in my homey mess and recycled or tossed quite a lot of it, and been validated for how I have cared for my daughter with a metabolic disorder and CP by people in the know who say I have done well by reducing PT and just living. I have read books to my kids and encouraged them. I have loved myself, if not fully, at least I have tried, and told myself it is OK to gain weight while I am in triple recovery, and I bought clothes for me in this size, to reconfirm my affirmation. Firm is a word that partly fits, except for when I jiggle a lot. I have prayed and meditated, though not always with feelings of peace. I have felt optimism, pessimism but less so, hope, despair (natch) but then, hope some more, belief I can truly make my journals of turmoil into a book that might help others recover from trauma and despair, doubt, and, ultimately, belief, again. We have been to the zoo, swimming lessons, the lawn mower repair shop, book club, the store (too many times to count reliably) and I almost set up the computer again to receive pix so I can catch up on holiday and event posts.

Crap, I am pooped. But also, I am having some extra coffee so I can keep going.

Put out the sun, dismantle the moon, tear up all the flowers

The bloom is off the rose of love.  Or so it seems when your Valentine killed himself one year ago. How did I mark the anniversary of being notified of my husband's suicide? I had a couple kids over for a sleepover and let the four younguns trash the house.  How did I mark the anniversary of the Valentine's Day I had last year, when I was tearing about buying pills and clothes for my kids to wear to their father's funeral?  I had a cookie decorating and craft party for my daughters and friends, and let the five younguns trash the house. Despite my fifty dollars worth of icing, cookies, new scissors and rolls of tape, they ended the affair not with things of pink but with making Fairy Soup by grinding grass and bits of plants with rocks into a wooden bowl of water on the front porch.  And I let the bowl stay there, to attract the odd Fairy who might happen by. I hope she might put the bloom back on the rose. Maybe even plant the rose.  And when we got good and exhausted, the next day, to mark the anniversary of the funeral, we stayed in our pajamas and hung out, and hung on, and we rested.  Enough grieving. I've been a widow for one year, and the book sucks, so now I need to add some new chapters,

You snarky little turd, Depression

You have a mouth like a sailor. Why do you curse like that? I see you coming but I will not fall prey to your wiles. You will not convince me of any more drama.  I see you, sneaking about, peering around the corners of my mind.  Piss off and take your demon brother Anxiety with you. I will let you in if I must but we are not going to bed. We will be business acquaintances at best.  I will not even friend you.  You may be reliable, familiar, even seductive, but this is a dance I prefer to sit out.  Ropes course?  No.  Not more than a promise of hypothetical coffee. I would rather keep it down to a polite nod to acknowledge we know one another but no longer really connect.  Take care.  Call me.  (I will consider it a butt dial).

Daughters! Sugar, spice, and everything nice!

I have two.  Just got online, looked at my stats, and found that someone was looking at a post from four years ago, a Friday Haiku for Claire the Magnificent.  Four years ago!! 2009!  Before a number of things made me come unglued altogether . . . and so here she is, still Magnificent.

Not only Magnificent but wonderful altogether, and keeping me grounded and happy.  Here's to Claire, who is almost a second grader with the ability to read "Middle Grade" books and the wisdom to know how much she enjoys that ability. My mini-me in all the very best ways. And brave, and strong, and true.  My hero!

Who is miserable now?

So while I was away from this space, the physical space around me was altered by maturing and growing children.  Hannah is headed to Kindergarten soon, totally mainstream. Claire now wears clothes sized nearly to her age, Hannah, though still stick figure skinny, could actually get out of the big toddler car seat and into a 35 pound rated booster . . . but worse than that, is the vocabulary growth.  Claire made a witty joke about the womb when she heard Hannah morph the r in room.  Granted she is all for a low grade knock-knock joke as well, but when I recently offered her a bit of my cheese toast, she, observing my fruit salad topped with whip-its delight said "my eyes are on the cream." WTF? When first she said "what the heck is going on?" I blamed her environment and heaved more than one sigh of relief that the phrase came from a wretched popular children's movie.  Last week I promptly lost all my helicopter parent cred by showing her YouTube shorts of songs from Les Mis, which she now begs for daily.  Mommy can we watch Red and Black? And then Do You Hear the People Sing? Sure I say, until I hit upon a making of the movie clip, and got stuck when the costume director explained the color choices for prostitutes coordinating with the imprisoned slaves.  Oh yeah, Mommy, nicely played.  Now explain prostitutes, slavery and metaphor.  When I told Claire that Fantine sold her body I said she sold her hair and her . . . teeth.  True!  She did!  And some other stuff.  And then I had to decide that I wasn't ready to show them Les Mis yet. I don't know which character she would emulate (Javert?) but I don't want to find out.

My life is out of order, so why not my blog?

I should have posted Halloween's gory, sugar-laden glory, but I haven't.  I should have memorialized the changes in the household as we swing into fall and settle into the "school year" which for all obvious reasons ought to be when we celebrate the New Year - but I haven't.  And three posts of "significance" are in the drafts folder, moldering in their significance. 

So let's just focus on this weekend past, and the development of a toddler in diapers and her metamorphosis into Undie Girl! Who wears panties!  And sometimes pees through them right into her shoes but still - panties they are and panties they shall remain, regardless of how urine soaked they may be!

I know I am lucky that my child with CP is training in a normal age range, and some of my bloggy friends will read this post with envy in their hearts and I do not blame them one tiny little bit, but I think those who don't live with CP or see Hannah tip, slip and shuffle every day and the ways in which she compensates to keep herself oriented will know how her condition makes this type of skill building more challenging than it is for typically developing kids.  My sister told me that she thought potty training was easy (yeah, I know) and she just waited until her kids were developmentally capable of doing each step on their own and then she just told them they were potty trained and it was done in a day.  My response was something like "oh dear, I've swallowed a bug . . . 'scuse me while I cough 'til I vomit so you can't tell whether I am laughing or crying" and then I explained that I'd hoped that Hannah would potty train before the point at which her size and balance would allow her onto a grownup potty without a very real possibility of doom and bloody head injuries.  So we waited a bit to push it, until her preschool teacher said she was ready to move forward.  So of course she wants to do it herself, now that she knows the joys of peeing in the toilet, and so we now have worked out that she should step onto the step stool, pivot slowly and carefully and safely to face away from the toilet, pull down the panties and pants while standing on the stool, and then sit down.  I particularly enjoy the stand up wipe maneuver she has created while standing on the step with her pants around her knees, and the shrieks of "Hannah do it!  Hannah do it!" should I try to help her get her pants up before she tumbles to the floor with an arm that doesn't do a lot to break a fall and her knees tied together.  It is nerve wracking, rather, but I haven't got another plan.  Because I want her to speak to me as an adult, I show you only the photos of the approach and the about to sit down position . . .  I'd just like to say it is a good place to have your sense of calm tested.  And I recommend not wearing the tutu.  Just sayin'.

You may not know this but I suck at mind reading, in Hannah's eyes, anyway.  Invariably I am supposed to help her, or not, and I get it wrong.  She manages to get her pants back up on her own with only a 15% angle droop on her affected right side.  I was complimented by our OT when I described how I've been coaching Hannah on getting her pants up and down by hooking the thumb and then sliding it around to the side.  But by the end of the weekend she had scratched her right leg a fair bit with the awkwardly oriented thumb sliding up and down the leg, but she did mostly handle the pants herself and I believe ultimately this will challenge and improve her right hand strength and dexterity and particularly her thumb strength in an important way - but my heart may give out before we get there if I have to watch her pull up her pants standing on that stool too many more times with her heavy little noggin (weighing more than her tiny ass, I am quite sure) just dangling out over those unforgiving tiles.  I am sure there is a mathematical equation to describe the fulcrum and whatnot of head hanging forward while butt dangle backward and tug the pants with unequal force between the sides and not apply too much force that puts the whole thing in a downgoing motion.  From my recollection of higher math and physics and how they become one in the end, I have gleaned that the equation looks something like   O(h) x WTF + zOMG    where h is Hannah and F is floor and OMG is that unreliable thumb with a curl and the directions say solve for fuckity fuck.  I think I told you I don't have a math degree, right?

I like it better when she drives.  

Someone is very, very, very close to reading. 

The confusion and excitement and whirlwind of the last couple of months can best be demonstrated by my Fall centerpiece - consisting of three miniature ornamental ears of corn, some autumn leaves collected by the girls on our many leaf walks, and a piece of rubber dog poo, to keep things in perspective.  Wanna come over for dinner?

Please stand by . . . or, walk this way

Folks, you've been mighty patient with me, and I thank you for that.  I never finished boasting about Hannah's birthday.  I haven't yet told you of the process of closing out our case with Early Intervention and the bittersweet farewell to the occupational therapist we had for more than two years, and the sixth bureaucratic caseworker in the same span of time.  And of course, having the relationship change between our family and Michael Workman, the Angel of PT, without whose Bamboo Brace we would not be where we are today.  And then I didn't get to tell you about our preparations for kindergarten for Claire, or the choice to keep Hannah in the group of the people on the younger end of her day care class - the ones who are "not quite ready" to be a Busy Bee and so will be Big Ladybugs, at least for the time being.  And how this decision concerns me as it makes me wonder of the wisdom of keeping Hannah, with her late summer birthday, in the cohort that would be her regularly assigned class or might I, instead, hold her back a year so the physical disparities are not so great between her and her classmates and yet leaving her less intellectually challenged.  In her preschool class, no one else knows all their letters (and has done so for eight months) and yet many others can speak more clearly about the letters they do in fact know.  I haven't told you how I worry that the decision I make for this year will not bind us to a certain result in kindergarten - but the choice I make in our kindergarten year will indeed bind us for the rest of her school career.  How will I get that one right?

I also haven't told you how delightful the two girls are to be around.  Fart jokes aside, they have lovely manners and they are wonderfully loving to each other (excepting the odd and oddly lethal sounding disputes over the toy of the moment).  I think they truly miss being in the same school even though they didn't play together on a daily basis there.  Hannah was given a chance to select a sucker from a large jar as bribery for allowing a medical assistant to weigh and measure her, and she took two - so she could give one to her sister - and then wouldn't even open hers until she saw big sis later on and could present it herself.  I haven't told you how joyful Claire really is - even in the roughest moments.  Case in point - the new kindergarten schedule has us waking so, so, so early  (compared to last month, that is) and when I went to wake her she threw her arm around my neck and said "Mommy!  Mommy! Woo-woo-woo!!" (the traditional family way to praise someone about virtually anything).   At 7:40 a.m.!  I think she likes kindergarten.

I haven't told you how discombobulated I am to not have to consider the dog when I want to slip out the back door unnoticed, or I start to pour water in her bowl until I realize her bowl is no longer needed.  We failed to adequately recognize the extraordinary effort she put into cleaning the floor, and have had to increase the mopping schedule considerably and we still are not up to Sophie's standard of cleanliness.

And finally, I haven't told of Hannah's extraordinary progress in gross motor skills generally and in foot function specifically that led her treating physician to decide that she didn't need to wear an AFO, and we'll re-evaluate in six months but it looks quite as if this is a child who might not spend her childhood in braces.

And so we say goodbye to footwear like this:

And hello to cheap footwear from Target - every girl's dream.

Walk this way, please!

They say it's your birthday . . . you're gonna have a good time!

My baby left babyhood.  Those of you who find me sentimental, well, overly sentimental, should perhaps skip this post.  I am going to wax sentimental, and I won't likely wane.  May I introduce my daughter, Hannah Rose?  We've been working on saying "pleased to make your acquaintance" and formally shaking hands (mostly because it is a nice OT type maneuver to get that hand to turn thumb up) but also because it is fun.  I remember when Claire had just been born and I asked Lord Honey if he had been practicing saying "and have you met my daughter, Claire?" in his mind, in anticipation of introducing her to someone.  He was baffled that I might practice such a thing, but I was excited.  I wanted to say "my daughter" far and wide and frequently.  I liked that daughter so much I wanted a second child and hoped mightily to get another daughter.  And fortune smiled on me, and I got this daughter.

 

Have you met my daughter, Hannah? Born on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year, and under a lucky star.  As much as we could say we were unlucky that she had this annoying metabolic disorder, and more unlucky still to have had a metabolic crisis and a stroke in her first two days of life, we were lucky that Claire's lucky and unlucky c-section birth set in motion a need to have another c-section, and that having had Hannah delivered by c-section meant she was still at the hospital when her temperature dropped and her blood sugar tested low and after feeding didn't work she was eventually given a glucose IV (coulda been faster, like oh, say, STAT, the way it was written in her chart, but still) and that administration of glucose put an end to more damage occurring then and there.  So the luck and the unluck combine, the yin and the yang, the peanut butter and the jelly, and you still get a lovely girl, a lucky one, my daughter.

Some say she is lucky to have me, but I think I am luckier still to have her.  Go back and look at that first picture here.  Go on, I'll wait.  She is airborne.  She is brave and bold and funny and strong and beautiful and wicked smart.  And best of all, she is mine.  She says "I got you, Mommy! I got you!"  I got her.

She worships her sister, and who wouldn't.  Claire is so sparkly she competes with the sun.  Really, she does.

Look at that muscle tone!

Admire the hand placement.

Even at a birthday party where three-year-olds get amped up on Costco cake and become increasingly irrational, who wouldn't smile with a daughter like this one? Costs of renting a bounce house facility for a private party - more than some say is appropriate for a toddler.  Seeing her airborne?  Priceless.

Still here, barely, and fully in flux

Where Have We Been?

Eating Cupcakes, Nearly Naked

Because it is HOT and we like cupcakes.


We've been watching these people do stuff like this:

To be fair, Lord Honey found Hannah on the climbing wall after she disappeared at the door of the day care, with two feet and her good hand on the wall, so he told her to use Righty too and she did and she stayed up.  Stroke victim?  I don't think so. 

We've been going through a rough patch, a busy patch, a heat wave, and a period of extreme change and growth.  I had dental surgery to pull a tooth, implant some bone sand (that has an irritating way of coming up from the depths when I am not expecting it, and place an implant.  Claire had one of her crowns become uncomfortable necessitating a trip to the emergency dentist who prescribed antibiotics that have Claire living on the potty and jamming up the works with toilet paper (and now I know why parents count out squares of paper - and it is not about saving money as they always claimed, but preventing the need for plunger use).  Hannah has become an actual chatterbox, and Claire is about to start kindergarten.  I fired our hippotherapy provider and Hannah ages out of Early Intervention in about two weeks.  I think she is ready, but am I?

H, a fan of A, B, and C and a nice B-A-T-H

This post made it into the drafts folder about six weeks ago and never got further out than that. See what I mean about being a blogger who doesn't blog?

Doesn't she look all fresh and dewy? And yes, she is the same color as the bathtub, I can't really deny that. OK, there is a drool driblet on her chin. There often is. My husband is in denial. I tell him it is no longer age appropriate to drool, this means something else other than baby-ish-ness. She is two years, nine months and three weeks of age, roughly. We'll talk about this later, along with the lisp she has developed when she says "s" sounds. However, I don't think there is another child in her day care class who has complete mastery of the alphabet - upper and lower case, as she has for three months. So bite me, stroke, drool, and the horse you rode in on because we are here to kick your whoseewhatsee (this is a family blog, except when I feel like saying something more colorful). Please get some popcorn and enjoy the show.

Hello my lovelies!

I owe you guys, big time.  I have been a bad, bad blogger.  A good blogger may be many things, but most importantly - she blogs.  At least she shows up and posts appealing pictures.  A few of you have kindly, as requested, sent me the post that got away (it was very big, very juicy, really outstanding in every way - just like the fish that got away . . . except I didn't see it skipping off into the sunset waving the finger) and the nice thing to do would have been to say thank you by actually putting the post back up.  But since the last time I posted I have attended many weddings (three), had work keep me in the office until after 10:30 one night last week, I have taken the girls out for fun and wholesome activities involving fresh air, live music, and food from many cultures of the world  (we had one meal with food from the cuisine of El Salvador, Thailand, Vietnam, and Sudan) and we became so unfortunately full that we had to skip the churros (Basque churros, not Mexican churros) and the baklava of Bosnia (that really and truly was unfortunate as Bosnians really do know something very special about pastry).  So I have excuses, and they are many and varied.  But you didn't come here for excuses.   Let's give give you a look at what you really came here for.

I taught her to splash in puddles, in the name of physical therapy, of course

I've been reflecting a lot on where we are two years out from the CP diagnosis. CP awareness Day was "celebrated" a few weeks ago.  I meant to post, I intended to post, hell I even drafted a partial post.  Right now I am absolutely stunned by where we are today.  Two years ago, we had just had the diagnosis confirmed.  We started working on getting Hannah to sit up on her own and to roll over, and we started using the Bamboo Brace.

One year ago, just before Easter, Hannah started to crawl, and then crawled her way through a wet and chilly Easter Egg hunt, because "ooh, shiny!" is hard wired into any girl brain, damaged or not.  See for yourself:

A few weeks later she was walking. 

And the baby that looked like this, once:

Turned into this child:

Most importantly, her joy knows no bounds.

Hannah had her Early Intervention biannual testing last week, and managed to now score within in the average range of all areas tested, and in the above average range for . . . are you ready? . . . fine motor skills.  Take that stroke, you asshat!  Really what these results mean is that the testing instrument is not particularly well suited to make assessments about smarts kids with hemiplegia, and that testing of two year olds generally is not incredibly accurate.  Obviously my daughter is indeed smart and well suited to live in Lake Woebegone, where everyone is above average. 

Good things in dance class, February 2011

She's my tiny dancer

I can't write too much about this or I risk bawling my eyes out with pride, joy and all that stuff (my poor daughters do NOT understand why I cry when I am happy but I imagine they'll begin to understand after they get through puberty).

One of the reasons I hoped to have girls was the idea of taking Mommy-Daughter dance classes, after a dear friend of mine told me of her fond memories of taking dance with her mom. My mom would never have done such a thing with us, first because she tips over a lot (see a pattern?), second because she was too busy going to church to do a lot of activities with us, and lastly because it would have cost more money than she cared to spend. I did a few of these classes with Claire when I was on maternity leave with Hannah and then Claire was able to get dance classes at her day care, and now it seems the parent/child class options are limited to kids under age three or so. The Angel of PT recommended that I get Hannah into a dance class and I thought it would be a great fit because Hannah is really motivated by music, likes to dance when we play music or dance videos for her on YouTube, and I thought she'd pick up on how much I enjoyed it and that would help get her off to a great start. It may be a little harder to get her Dad to fill in for me as needed compared to sending him to parent/tot class at The Little Gym but I thought having a non-therapy based movement experience would be worth any hassles or price. It was a little harder to find a Saturday class with space and at a location that would work, but we signed up at the University of Utah's Virginia Tanner Creative Dance program. At first I was encouraged to sign up for the dancers with disabilities class (a wider age range of kids with all manner of disabilities for a reduced price of just $25!!!) but I was sure she'd benefit more from being in the regular class with all peers her own age. I struggle with putting her in situations where she might feel like the thing she is asked to do is out of her skill level, and I've seen that she just won't do what she is not comfortable with, such as using the bars at the Little Gym, but I thought dance would require less use of her right hand while providing more opportunities for other kinds of learning, since she loves music and dance so much already.

The tutu was my idea since modern dance only requires comfortable clothes but I suspected many other girls (and boys as it turned out) would have tutus. She has never willingly let me put it on before just for fun, and didn't before class, but once she got the idea of it she kept it on all day. We immediately liked the environment, and I was delighted that she showed no inclination to shyness or refusing to follow directions at the outset.

Huge success!

Checking out the studio

Each new activity involves the kids coming back to the carpet for a little circle time while the teacher introduces the next activity

Hannah volunteered ("ME!") to be the student to demonstrate the "snow blanket" moves

Why yes, I can stand on my right foot.

What's next? I'm ready.

The only bad experiences were that three times when all the kids were dancing (running) about, someone would either crash into her or come close to it and she easily toppled over but she just looked surprised and got up and kept going. When the kids were asked to go to the ballet barre and hang on like a monkey she wouldn't even try that, since I think she knows she can't hang from her weaker hand, and during some circuits of the room she would cut a few steps and jump in ahead of the leader. When we were flapping like a bird she didn't use her arms like wings but actually, I'm not sure all the other kids did either, I guess it takes experience to apply your imagination in the way you use your body. But mostly, she was willing to do follow the leader (a skill I didn't realize was included but which may come in handy), she could two hand the props we used like scarves, or pom-poms, she listened during the story at the end, and she actually volunteered two different times to be the student to model the next activity with the teacher. Holy cow did that do my heart good - to see that her confidence was right up there with all the other kids. Multiple kids had moments of crying or a case of the "I wanna" blues, but Hannah was cheerful and responsive and carefully observing everything around her. She is probably less verbal than most of her peers but since her receptive language is so awesome that when the teacher said "who wants to tiptoe around the bubble circle?" then Hannah could easily get in a "ME!" ahead of all the others. One unexpected bonus was all the clapping - that fisted hand doesn't really want to open for things like clapping, but it might - either to applaud another dancer or to keep time with the piano meant she used her right arm far more than I would have counted on and certainly enough to build muscle strength.  And thank all that is holy, not one person asked me about her gait or her hand taping or anything that would make me cry.  Win!  The one and only difficulty we had was getting her to leave the place, which required trickery, bribery, a distraction with a drink from the water fountain, and a pine cone offered to her by one of the dads from our class, who she'd been flirting with earlier.

I am ashamed to have to tell you that my efforts at the tiptoe steps, getting up and down off the floor repeatedly, and spinning left me with sore calf muscles.  If a toddler dance class makes you sore, you probably need to work on your fitness level yourself, but still . . . WIN!  She shoots, she scores!  We'll be back.

Hell's bells, I don't know where the time has gone. Mo specifically asked me to write about the results of constraint therapy for Hannah, and so I will, but first I'll give my excuses for why I am so very absent. I had meant to blog from Disneyland, but I was really in a lot of pain after oral surgery to extract a tooth and begin an implant process, so every time my kids were down and I could rest I didn't feel like getting on the computer. On the night before Thanksgiving, I slipped on ice carrying Hannah, two glass bowls and the school photos, all of which needed protecting and so I torqued my body in the air to not land on Hannah and thereby tore my hamstring.  When folks picked us up and dusted us off the baby wasn't even damp. I win! I really seriously injured myself though, so now when I get my kids down in the evening I need to lie down and try to elevate my hamstring/thigh above my heart to reduce swelling (not easy). So, I beg your pardon if I normally comment on your blog, or if I normally give you something to read, and I've been letting you down.  I look forward to things getting better in six to eight weeks.  Yeah.  Good times.


Hannah did three and a half weeks of constraint casting. The half week was added because I wanted someone professional to take the cast off, because my daughter is a smart cookie and if we do this again in six months I didn't want her to remember that I could take her cast off, I wanted it to be done by a therapist. We definitely see improvement in the use of her affected hand/arm. I would absolutely recommend this therapeutic approach. Hannah was upset but less so than I expected. I was a bit wound up for a while before the cast was put on because I thought she might cry for days and we would wimp out and give in and take it off. She really was fine at the outset, but she did have difficulty sleeping, and staying asleep, largely because the cast literally weighed ten percent of her tiny body weight. Those of you with bigger kids might not have this issue. My treating therapists have a child wear the cast and simply go about their daily lives, we didn't do the six hours of special OT that make up the basis of some programs in other parts of the country, so this was probably a lot easier. Hannah's biggest challenge was with eating, she simply would not use her right hand to put food in her mouth and she seemed indignant that she would be fed like a baby, but she did let us feed her. I was flexible about letting her use her binky more than we had, since I've been trying to reduce use and encourage more speech, but she foxed me by getting her day care minions to put her binky in her mouth. After a morning therapy session I dropped her at the day care and stayed to eat lunch with her so of course I fed her.  Her little friends gathered around us to monitor the mom in their midst. I kept the binky clipped to her shirt so she'd have to use her right hand to get her binky in her mouth. When she would try to do it the movement really exposed that supination is something that we really need to work on but she developed a work around. I saw her look at her two favorite boys, and say "binky" and they both leapt in and tried to be the one to get the binky first and get it in her mouth. Minions! At age two! She has since moved to the next up aged class and now is at the bottom of the pecking order, where the toddlers take her binky out of her mouth and say "binky in your pocket, Hannah!"

Results: extraordinary. the first week after removing the cast we were in Disneyland so I couldn't observe much in the way of the results because Hannah was not often in a place where she might pick up smaller items. I did buy some toys to encourage bilateral tasks - cookies in little plastic "jars" and things of that nature and we worked on those in the car. Now that we are home, I can see more of what she is doing with her affected hand. What is most noticeable is that she uses her hand much more automatically, or when necessary, she uses her hand to hold the thing she picked up first then picks up a second item with her good hand. She is much quicker to use her right hand to balance a cup or bottle, or hold a bowl of Cheetos while she feeds herself with her good hand.
 

Go Righty, go, get that foam number.