Paisley is now 18 months old, I turned 22 a few days ago, and Brandon turned 25 in August. Paisley is very vocal, blowing bubbles and spitting everywhere too. She loves to say "Boom", other than that it's still a lot of Oohs and Aahs with an occasional consonant thrown in. Paisley is a biter and she thinks it's funny. I finally had to stop breastfeeding her at 12 months because my milk supply was getting pretty low and with nothing else to do she would bite. There's really no good way to discipline her or tell her "no" yet so I just cut her off cold turkey. She's still not reaching, but has developed an obsessive need to scratch EVERYTHING. It was explained to us as "surface scratching" and it's just a sensory thing. It can sometimes interfere with basically anything we're doing though because she will get so into it. Still not sitting up independently. She can prop sit for about thirty seconds on a really good go.
She still goes to therapy all week. PT twice a week for 45 minutes, OT twice a week for 30 minutes (they took one session out a week for about a month because she wouldn't use her hands, I was mad), and Speech twice a week for 30 minutes (one session is still feeding, and one is actual speech!). We still see our amazing early interventionist, Andrea, once a week and I got Paisley into a research program called Early Learning Games (IF YOU HAVE A CHILD WITH DELAYED DEVELOPMENT AT ABOUT A 5 - 8 MONTH OLD LEVEL AND ARE IN THE NEARBY AREA PLEASE LET ME KNOW). Early Learning Games is a study that the Puckett Institute in North Carolina is doing where an early interventionist comes to the house once a week and teaches me how to play games with Paisley to stimulate development, learning things like cause and effect, etc. It is so much fun, it's really helped Paisley so far, plus the data will help other children like Paisley. If you're interested in knowing more or what kind of games we play, please let me know. I email back or if I get a lot of replies I might make a post explaining it thoroughly. Our EI for the games comes from 2 hours away each week so it can probably branch out to you guys a bit.
Nothing new with the eye doctor. Our rehab doctor was really excited last time we went to see her. She thinks Paisley's development since seizure control is very encouraging and wants Paisley sitting up independently by the next visit... in March. We're still a long way off so I feel like we have a deadline and I want to get to it!! We go for an EEG on January 15th and depending on that we might take one of her three daily doses of Topamax out. I would love to do that and have her more active, but I also see little triggers and worry about seeing seizures again. For an example, there is a toy at therapy that is spun and lands on a letter of the alphabet with an animal that starts with whatever letter it lands on and it makes the animals sound... So imagine a yak or turtle sound if you can. It's a very low frequency, slow sound. Paisley literally flinches, goes crazy with her eyes, and just looks really disturbed. It almost looks like an infantile spasm which just really freaks me out. I would really like to get her doing some sound conditioning if her rehab doctor will look into it for me.
I really think that's about it for her development/doctors/therapy right now. I wish I had more time to post so I could be a lot more thorough for our family members and for other Liss families. I will try to post more pictures on Paisley's Facebook page and try to post more on here as things happen. I really will! So don't stop reading. Maybe some videos too!
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