June
2009
This Week in Dorrieland0
This week was our first full week with the stander. We’re still working on perfecting how to keep her legs fully supported — the pads that go around the knee are great, but the leg grooves(?) are much larger than her legs are, so the pads don’t actually hold her in place. So far it seems like shoving some rolled up blankets in between the pad and the knee may work to fill up the extra space. More importantly, Dorrie continues to enjoy going in the stander, at least for the first few minutes. Her enthusiasm definitely wanes after that, though she is at least stoic and endures until we take her out.
The PT told us that her stroller/chair had been approved by insurance, so now we’re just waiting for the equipment manufacturer to get it shipped out. Woot! In anticipation, we’ve rearranged our entire living room to better accomodate the increasing amount of large stuff we have to have around. We’ve also had to discard the area carpet we had in there; somehow some pukie did not get cleaned up 100% and began to stink and worse, it looked like it was growing something!! Gross! Bob cut out the spot with the carpet knife, but a hole in the carpet just looked too trashy for words. So we got an el cheapo replacement at Home Depot. Hopefully next year we’ll be in a position to replace these floors. The tile is really hard.
Dorrie has been a very boogeriffic baby the past few weeks, dating back pretty much to the beginning of May, when she had an ear infection. Then both mom and dad got sick, and Dorrie seemed to have a lingering ick herself. A couple of weeks ago her eye suddenly got very gooey, so we were alloted some drops by the ped. The goo did not completely go away and then suddenly it was coming out everywhere — her ear, her nose, her suctions. (Gross again). We started another course of eye drops and somehow it seems to be helping everything, so I’m hoping we’re finally seeing the last of this ick. Now if only daddy’s cough would go away.
Dorrie has made some significant progress with her arms in the past month. She is much more able now to direct her arms to where she wants them to be so that her hands make contact with desired objects and people. It’s clear it still takes her a lot of effort and concentration to do it, but the movements are much more deliberate. She’s enjoying a toy a brought back from IKEA — one of those things with looped wires holding wooden beads to move back and forth. Trying to get her hands and fingers on the beads is very good practice.