Weekly update

Overall Matt has had a pretty good week. We finally got the mower fixed with a new belt and he's been busy catching up for 2 days and everything is running fine. In PT, his hamstrings are finally engaging and he's able to control them pretty well. Up to this point, he was mainly using his quads to move his leg and wasn't able to extend just his lower leg. His therapist has been working his leg really hard this week and trying to fine tune his muscle control. She also has started swinging his right arm while he walks so that he can 'feel' it and watch it move. We're hoping to make a connection with his brain that the arm is moving naturally when he walks. (I don't really want to talk much more about his arm right now, but if you need something to think about to help Matt along - that would definitely be it.)

He had speech two days in a row this week, so since he didn't have time to complete much homework in between, she brought a reading test for Matt and it was fascinating. He did several groups of picture/word matching and only had trouble with one word. Then he had to read sentences that told him to point to something specific or answer a question from a picture. It took him awhile to read through everything, but he could actually process the sentences! Then he tried to move on to paragraphs, but after 45 minutes he was exhausted and it was too much to handle. He was pretty thrilled with the results, though, and told her to bring the paragraphs back sometime soon, maybe when he's not so tired.