therapy news, etc.

Today we had a review of Lewis' therapy. He's been enrolled in First Steps for 6 months now, and today we looked over our original goals to see how Lewis has progressed. In the areas of gross and fine motor skills we've seen a ton of progress. It's amazing to look back to our original meeting when Lewis could not stand up on his own. He was easily entertained because if he was sitting and playing on the floor, and a toy rolled out of reach, he just had to find something else nearby to entertain him. Now he goes where he wants, when he wants. He drags us around when he needs our help with something. He's really basically caught up in this area and functioning at his age level, which is amazing!

Speech was a much different story. While he has not had tons of progress, he has gotten much older which means what is expected of Lewis is much greater than when we started. As a result, his scores in communication actually went down from where he was 6 months ago. He is vocalizing more lately, but he mainly sticks with a few limited sounds. It's hard to know how to motivate him to branch out verbally.

After discussing Lewis' situation at length, our coordinator and therapists came up with a plan to petition the state for more therapy time for him. Ideally he will end up with 2 hours of speech therapy a week (up from 45 minutes now), and an hour with his developmental interventionist. We are praying that this request will be granted and soon! It was certainly disappointing to know that our 21 month-old is communicating at a 9 to 10 month level, but we feel so fortunate to have a team of people working on Lewis' behalf since Justin and I are so limited in our abilities. Keep praying for Lewis to catch up, and for us to know the best ways to motivate him.

Regarding the next baby........here's my latest belly shot. I'm 27 weeks pregnant, which means the baby should survive from this point on should I go into pre-term labor. And I'm officially in the 3rd trimester too. Fun times.