Meeting Claudia- Bella's Newest Therapist

Bella was in rolled into ECI (Early Childhood Intervention) close to a month ago and yesterday we met our first in home therapist. The therapist, Claudia, is working on Developmental Therapies with Bella. This is an all around therapy. Working with her body and mind as a whole rather than just focusing on a specific area like they do in Physical and Occupational Therapy.

Bella has been really shy and has a hard time in new places so it was really nice to have someone come to our house and work with Bella in her own environment! Bella really seemed to enjoy it and took well to her, plus Kallie got to be involved too. It was much more like play therapy, we had an hour long supervised play session.

Claudia would place toys in certain areas of the living room to make it a challenge for Bella. She asked a lot of questions regarding Bella's Physical and Occupational Therapies and feeding / speech issues. Claudia was extremely pleased with Bella's curiosity, focus and "smarts". She said that is the best thing going for Bella. A lot of times you see kids that are behind but they are also severely cognitively behind as well. Bella is not too far from where she should be cognitively, but physically she is still several months behind and has a hard time doing things "correctly".

A struggle in therapy these days, with Bella, is that she has actually figured out how to do things in different ways. If it is a strain on her body, then she has another way to do it and get it done. This sounds like it would actually be a good thing right? The issue is, if she adapts and learns other ways to do things, such as getting around, then she will never learn the correct way. Her therapist strongly believe that if we can teach Bella's body and mind the correct way to do things (crawling, sitting, walking, running etc.), then she will flourish and be able to do them for the rest of her life, but is it going to take work!



Trying to hide from us!

It takes a long time to break bad habits but once they are broken, they usually stay that way. This is true as long as Bella does not have a big growth spurt where her muscle tightness causes her to develop slight deformities, such as walking on her tipy toes, that need to be worked through again.  Claudia told us, much like all of her other therapist have mentioned, that Bella's inability to do certain things seems to be coming from her high tone and spasticity, not her brains inability to function correctly. Her brain knows what to do, her muscles a forbidding it.

Of course, this is all speculation in the therapy world, but it sure does give a lot of reassurance. As a parent all you want is the best for your child and if Bella requires therapy for the rest of her life, then that's what we will do! We will make it fun, we will make it a daily routine and the whole family will do daily stretching and exercises with her to make sure she doesn't feel alone :-)