working on...

Even though his arm just started moving, we're looking for another big step forward, but we have to be content with how the little things are progressing right now. In speech, he's been reading half -page paragraphs out loud! He read through two yesterday and it just about wiped him out, but he made it through all the sentences. Piecing all the little words together is really hard and frustrating - but he's doing so much better than even two weeks ago.

Whenever Matt walks up stairs, he always steps up with his good leg and then swings the right leg up to the same step. It's really slow going, but he hasn't had the muscle strength to bend his right leg enough to lift it up to the next step. He started working on this last week, though, and it's slowly coming along - he's even trying it outside of therapy whenever we come across stairs. He's still working without his brace or cane in therapy and went up and down a pretty steep hill today with almost no trouble. He isn't ready to try that at home, yet, but he is getting there.

Watch this!

Just one week ago, Matt couldn't move his arm at all. Then last Thursday, they called me into his therapy session and we watched him move his arm just a little bit - and it gave him a crazy headache to concentrate that hard. By the end of the weekend, he could do this! He's also gaining strength through his arm and shoulder - he can push against his therapist as she moves his arm around. Now he has to work on control in his wrist and fingers, but he's a lot closer to a functioning arm than it looked like he would be.

Exponentially

This is Norfi - Matt's therapy horse. He's had two sessions now and he loves it.

Matt was explaining to us the other day how he was getting better with just a slight incline and now it's become a steeper incline. It only took him two tries to be able to repeat the word exponentially, so his speech is coming along. We're working on finding him more functional things (like writing checks and IDing traffic signs) to do for speech therapy now and that seems to be making a big difference. I walked in the other day and he was looking at a magazine (which he has not wanted to do yet) and he said he's starting to be able to understand more when he tries to read.

He left OT on Friday telling me that he thought it went really well - which hasn't happened for as long as I can remember. He's always been so frustrated by OT that he doesn't really like to talk about it, so when he came out happy with the session it was a really good sign.