Tessa has been five months for a little over a week. I have not been putting off this update, I’ve have just been waiting for some calm so that I could get all the information in one post.
And then I realized that there is no calm and decided to write it anyway.
At four months, we decided to schedule her ear tube surgery and bronchoscopy. Then, as is well documented on this blog, we had the pneumonia hospital visit and subsequent recovery. Now, we wait. Surgery is scheduled for June 5th, which puts it after school gets out (no time without pay, yay) and during the time that I was originally scheduled to travel to Costa Rica. Clearly, God was keeping me back for a reason.
Here is where we are at in terms of therapy:
Physical Therapy
Tessa is a rock star on her tummy. She is right at her age with her “tummy skills.” She is still wearing kinesio tape to help activate her muscles. I still think the idea of tape on the belly is kind of bizarre, but we’re going with it. She’s slightly more delayed with her sitting skills (about a month). We have had the chance to break out the Bumbo seat and while she can’t last it in for a long period of time, she does kind of like to see the world from a new perspective.
The therapist has recommended using cabinet liner to help stabilize her when she sits in the Bumbo or when we do “couch sitting,” which is when she sits using the corner of a couch for support. Creative, cheap, useful… It works.
Tessa’s new strange habit is this loud groaning sound that she makes regularly while tensing up all of her muscles. We’re glad that she’s practicing using the “right” muscles (the ones that flex), but the groan kind of freaks people out. My theory is that she just likes to hear her own voice (just like her mother).
Speech Therapy
Upright feeding is going great, hurray!! We are at a point where anyone who wants to can give her a bottle and that makes me a very happy momma. The next step is building up her core and mouth muscles to prep for solids. We hope to start with some cereals this summer, but need to make sure that her body is ready for the different textures. We do mouth stretches with her and use a little tool that looks like of like a solid straw with ridges on it to massage her gums and tongue. I’m happy with her progress here, but curious to see if the bronchoscopy will reveal anything interesting going on inside her throat.
Here, you can see how happy Tessa is to have to sit at the dinner table, but not get any cupcakes:
Developmental Therapy
So we’re seeing some more pronounced delays here, but the victory is that progress is happening. Tessa loves people. All people. All faces. All toys with faces. But things without faces? Not so much. She is reaching, which is good, but we need to get her hands to open up a little more. She can’t interact until she gets motivated to grab at things and explore, so the new development in developmental therapy is that it’s time to call in occupational therapy.
Sorry, that was a lot of terms.
Basically, Tessa’s occupation is to play, so we need to make sure she can do that effectively. We are going to get her started with some occupational therapy to help this progress… because while Ellie is a great example for Tessa, she does a lot more toy-swiping than toy-giving.
(this is the best of my failed attempt at a cute picture of these three)
Overall, we are joyful at the growth in both of our girls, prayerfully optimistic that surgery will go well, and ecstatic that our summer is finally here. Just three more days of class for me, another week for John and we will have lots of this…
and this…
and hopefully not so much of this… but I had to send some love to my husband (and dad) for fixing my car…
Welcome back summer, we’ve missed you.
Yo soy La Lay 