Two year old Ocupational Therapy assessment

Raphael had an Occupational Therapy (OT) assessment today and passed with flying colours.

This gives us even more incentive to focus on his communication and gross motor skills which are lagging behind significantly.

Advanced fine motor skills

Raphael has been improving his fine motor skills lately. So much so that this Occupational Therapist has gone as far as to say that his fine motor skills are now advanced for his age.

This is amazing. He started off with people calling him delayed, then slightly delayed. We were then warned that his development will be adversely effected by him not being able to participate in eating finger foods. But now his OTs say that he is advanced for his age.

We have ready that early intervention is very successful for CHARGE kids and it is nice to be able to say that Raphael is turning out to be one of these success cases.

Well done my boy!

Measuring up for a rail

Today Raphael's Occupational Therapist visited to measure him up to find out what height rails would be needed for our front steps.

Our front steps are quite high and it is expected that his balance problems will cause him great difficulty in getting down them so we are looking at the possibility of installing a rail so that he will be able to get down the steps easily. We are hoping that disability services will fund the installation of the rail for us, but there are no guarantees of this.

Early learning

My wife took Raphael to Early Learning this morning I believe that the general advice was that the Physiotherapist was happy with Raphael's development but the OT (occupational therapist) thought that he was lagging quite a bit.

The problem with his fine motor skills might be becuase other children his age are picking up small pieces of food with their fingers to eat but of course he doesn't get this experience; he can't even eat mashed potato, let alone a whole sultana. So we are going through our toys looking for things with small things to grab hold of. Of course we can't just give him tiny things because of the risk that he might put them in his mouth and choke on them. The only thing that I can think of at the moment is baby puzzles that have the little knobs on the pieces to pick them up by.

My wife believes that Raphael has made attempts at verbalising a few words:
All done: "Ada"
Zài jiàn (Chinese for goodbye): "Dyadya"
Gěi: (Chinese for give): Ge

She claims that the evidence is that:

• the sound is approximately correct
• he has said these things more than once; and
• he says them in conjunction with sign language (or action in the case of give)
  

I think that Annie is still being a bit optimistic about this being speech. I suspect that this might turn out to be another "head scratching incident" as he has not signed mummy in a very long time. But regardless of this we will use his sounds back to him (and with the correct pronunciation) to reinforce this behavior and with any luck he will learn that he has actually said an understandable word and not just a coincidental grunt.

ELT consulation

Raphael went to an Early Learning Tasmania session today with Annie. Annie said that he was a bit bemused with the six or so women with varied specialities giving him their full attention.

• General teacher
• Vision and mobility specialist
• Speech pathologist
• Physiotherapist
• Occupational therapist
• Session recorder
• and of course mummy
  

Calvary Health Care Children's Therapy Services (CHC) first visit

Annie took Raphael to his first CHC appointment today. At this visit there was a social worker, physiotherapist and occupational therapist).

They all had a short chat about Raphael and then put him on the floor with some toys to see what he could do. After some prompting and testing Kylie said that:

• he is demonstrating some problem solving skills which is better than what she was expecting of him,
• he also demonstrates good concentration
• he is generally delayed in fine motor skills,

The physiotherapist said that the next step for his gross motor skills is to get Raphael moving from sitting to crawling and crawling to sitting.