Hippotherapy again

This week Gabe wasn't working on Monday so he came out to hippotherapy with us, which was nice. For the first time ever Avery didn't want to get on the horse! She kept on saying "Noooo!" and crying when Miss Kathy took her over to the horse. Of course, she was fine once she was on the horse and it started moving, but it was strange! She's never not wanted to go ride the horse before, so I don't know what that was about. She had a cold over the weekend and still wasn't feeling completely better, so that was probably it.

Here she is "driving" Promise with her "steering wheel"!!

Flying like an airplane! She can now do this for quite a long time, which is great because of course it means that her core strength and trunk stability is getting stronger.


Clapping, tapping her helmet and high fives are all regular parts of the routine :

Next week is the last week of hippotherapy this fall :( How sad. And it might be our last time at Many Blessing Farm, which is even sadder, because they're all so nice there. But starting in the spring Carilion will be doing hippotherapy down near Rocky Mount, so we should be able to do it there with Lisa her PT, which would be wonderful for 2 reasons:

1. It's Lisa. Lisa is great. And She's been working with Avery since she was a tiny little 4 month old :)
2. It's less than 20 minutes from our house, whereas we drive almost an hour to get to Many Blessings Farm.

So, while we love the farm, and Avery not only loves the horses and the people, but also the cats and the bunnies :), it just wouldn't be smart to carry on going out there if we have the option of doing it closer to home. Also, it would be less complicated as far as insurance goes, because right now she's getting therapy through 2 providers (Center for Rehab and Development, and Carilion Pediatric Therapies), which her insurance doesn't like and it's a big ordeal to get it re-approved every few months. They want he to only have therapy through one provider, so they would probably like it better if she was doing PT and hippotherapy through carilion. Anyway, that's a few months down the road, so we;ll see how it all pans out then.

Theratogs

I know I've mentioned TheraTogs before, but we've been using them a lot more diligently for the past couple of weeks, so this morning I took a couple of pictures of Avery wearing them so you could see what they look like.

She looks like she's standing on her own here, but she's actually leaning against the table! But her standing balance has been getting better too - her record is 12 seconds!

So, before we got our own set of theratogs, Avery just borrowed some once a week when we went to PT, and she wore them over the top of her clothes. Now that she has her own, I put them on underneath her clothes before she goes to school. It's been great because 2 weeks ago I went into school to show Leslie (her teacher) how Avery wears the theratogs and how to put them on, and we talked about how to gradually build up to her wearing them the whole time she's at school. The PT and I had talked about that before, and she had said that we wouldn't want to go straight into wearing them all day because it would make her sore, since they basically pull and stretch her muscles the whole time she's wearing them. So we'd been putting them on for short periods at home for a while, and the plan was to send her to school wearing them, and then to play it by ear and take them off as soon as they were bothering her. While I was there Avery walked around in her walker with her theratogs on, and they were as amazed by the improvement as I was the first time I saw her wear them! They really do a great job.

So the next day (Friday) I put them on her before the school bus arrived, and when she got home Leslie had written a note in her book saying that she'd asked her if they were bothering her every few minutes or so, and Avery said she was fine until about 1:50pm when she said they hurt and she wanted to take them off. So that was pretty impressive! Almost 3 hours, because I put them on her at about 11am. And almost every day since then she's come home still wearing them!

She really doesn't mind wearing them at all. Some days she complains when I tell her it's time to put them on, but she does that sometimes for her braces, eye patch, and even when I just want to do her hair! So it's not because they're torturous or anything, it's just because she's an opinionated 2 year old :) Of course, that's not to say that they don't get a little uncomfortable sometimes... the way they work is by stretching and pulling, so the straps have to be tight enough to do that, so sometimes when she's been wearing them for a while, they do leaves quite sore-looking marks. And while they do go under her clothes, they go over the top of her braces, so the marks from her braces are also a little more pronounced.

The elastic straps that wrap around her leg have a silicone criss cross paterrn that helps them stay in place, that's what made this pattern. You can also see the outline of her braces on the back of her calf here, and her sock mark.

In this picture you can see why we need new braces. They're not supposed to leave those red marks on her ankle or heel. And I have to say that while it looked particularly sore on this day, and the worst of the red marks didn't fade completely for an hour or so after I took them off, it didn't seem to bother Avery very much. She didn't complain about it at all. She just said "Okay" when I asked her if she wanted to take her braces off when she got home.