Whew- Catching Up, At Last!

Will pushing his toy in the playroom/sunroom. Notice how he now prefers to be on his feet rather than crawling! (see below at end of post)
First strawberry & Lovin it!

Playing at Opportunity Park with Elena. We've just discovered this park & it is great for toddlers! It was designed to people with special needs / wheelchairs/etc so it has lots of ramps rather than stairs & astroturf instead of unstable sand! We love it!!!

Whew! What a busy 2+ weeks we have had in our house! I'm really trying to torture encourage myself to persevere through Will's baby scrapbook. I'm now through Christmas of 2007! Yea me- (& don't tell but I'm actually kind of sort of enjoying it.) Anyway, that's why I've cut back on the blog recently - nap time means shower, clean up, dishes, cook dinner, & work on sun room or scrapbook.

We've continued our school search & saw another school this week- Midland Classical Academy. I don't know if this will be the school for Will or not but I am interested in learning more about them. They have an interesting structure for elementary school - students go to school 2.5 days a week and are homeschooled the other two days. This does interest me for Will as I think it would give us more flexibility in scheduling his therapies without overwhelming his afternoons and evenings. Plus, while at this point I have no idea how much effort it will take for Will to accomplish certain tasks like writing, I feel like it may take him longer and require more effort due to the fact that he holds a pen in both hands & has to be very deliberate with his movements. Therefore, I like the idea of him having extra time at home to accomplish his school work. However, we still have a few more schools in our obsessive well thought out school search. (Look what I learned to do!!! Cross-thrus!)

Will has been doing his yearly assessments in each of his therapies. He is such a trooper! We had to postpone one for several days due to his catching the RSV which has caused our church nursery to be virtually empty for several weeks. Thankfully, he's all better now! The assessments have been good but somewhat emotional and difficult for me. Actually, one went great & I was on cloud nine for the rest of the day. The other one left me sobbing throughout naptime and crying myself to sleep that night - he did pretty good but it was tough & we are faced with some tough situations/decisions I never imagined myself in ... until the summer of 2007 I guess when I suddenly found myself imagining lots of things I never believed I would deal with unless I was starring in a Lifetime movie. But I'll share more about that later.


Will did pretty well in his physical therapy (gross motor skills) yearly assessment. He basically scored at about an 11 month level. However, she came back this week & his walking has improved so much that he is now at a 12 month level. Many of the questions, however, were discouraging as he automatically scored a "0" due to the wording of the question: "holds pencil using thumb and forefinger" for instance... not applicable to him.

In his occupational therapy (fine motor skills) and his developmental assessments, he scored the following:
adaptive behavior (self-help things like feeding himself, brushing his teeth, helping me get him dressed, etc.)- 18 months
Physical Development: 15 months
Communication/Vocabulary: 21 months
Social/Emotional: 22 months - Yep, there's finally proof to our name calling of "Mr. Social!"
Cognitive (learning & knowledge): 21 months
The best news? In OT, he is not delayed enough to even qualify for therapy!!! (But, he does qualify automatically due to his diagnosis.) That seemed like a small victor for us to hear those words from the developmentalist & therapist!

I attempted to film some of Will's tricks this week to send to Bubby & Gigi via dvd as they don't have a computer. They don't have a dvd player or even an answering machine for that matter so I sent the dvd to my mom to show them Will on her laptop. Anyway, thought I'd share with you!

Will can recognize lots of animals now in his books! He can say the sounds for: horse, sheep, & sometimes doggie. He makes funny fish lips for a fish sound. He can say the following animal names: doggie (of course), cat, and duck.

And our BIG news?!?!?! Will is WALKING everywhere!!! I'm used to counting steps due to therapy & he is well over 60 now ... I lose count!!! He literally went from 19 independent steps on January 30 to walking everywhere, stopping & starting again, turning corners, etc in 2 weeks!!! We are so amazed! His biggest challenge at this point is getting up when he falls. Because the prosthetics add so much length to his legs and change his center of gravity, he has to get back up in a rather unnatural way. He's close but not quite there - which makes my job a little challenging too. He actually WANTS to wear his zancos all the time - throws a fit a bedtime sometimes when I say no! We are encouraging his desire to wear them and walk so I now accompany him to our church nursery so that I can help him stand back up when he falls. Hopefully, he'll learn to do it on his own soon.

One of my goals for this quarter in pt was that Will would be able to walk from the car to a store or wherever without me holding him. By the next week when his therapist came back, we had actually gone out & accomplished this goal! So we had to set new quarterly goals! Way to go, Will!!! We are so proud of our walker!

In even BIGGER news, Will recently took his first steps WITHOUT prosthetics!!! He just really wants to be upright now! (Even when I give him playtime without the zancos- which I hide- he is crawling up on his feet!) He can take up to 6 steps without prosthetics on his own! This is a huge challenge for him due to the fact that he has very little to balance on - just calloused ankle bones! Way to go, Will!!! (Hopefully, I'll have a video of this to post soon!)