OT: Week 6, or PT

This week was good and bad. The good news is this girl can eat some oatmeal. The bad news is it is plugging her up and she screams whenever she tries to poop. She has also decided that vegetables, like the green beans we introduced this week, are yucky and either blows raspberries on them or won’t open her mouth after a few bites. She now recognizes the bottle as well and will yell at me, not scream or cry, but yell “ahhhhhhh,” when she sees it.

She still has a preference for thicker foods so I have been using my baby mill to grind up bananas for her, since they are thicker than baby food. We also introduced prunes and she seems to like them as well.

I asked Francis today if I should only feed Averi foods she likes since we are working on liking eating. She quickly said that once we loose that battle, it’s never won so we have to fix it now. She said to scoop some veggie onto the spoon and then dip it in a food she likes, like bananas. It sounds really nasty but I tried it at lunch today and it worked! She said that latter we will work on alternating bites between veggies and fruit.

Last week Francis asked me what Physical Therapies Averi was getting and was stunned when I told her none. So she told me that she could show me a few things today that we could work on along with eating.

The first thing we did was lay Averi down on a mat so Francis could show me some infant massage techniques to help with her constipation. I know you all really want to know about it, but she explained why Averi is more prone to have problems with this. Individuals with low muscle tone on the outside also have it on the inside. This means that her digestive system runs a little slower, allowing more fluid to be absorbed and causing her stools to be hard and dry. It’s all making sense to me now. Averi liked the massage and even peed on Francis to show her appreciation for stimulating all her abdominal organs.

Then, after several questions, Francis realized what Dan and I have been wondering about for months – several of the clinics Averi goes to have asked if she is getting PT, have said they would put her on a list, have said an evaluation needed to be done…and she has yet to receive any PT.

We then spent the remainder of the session doing a PT Evaluation on Averi, which includes using several specific toys and a thick notebook full of questions and numbers, so that Francis could submit the results to the neonatal clinic and we can hopefully get the ball rolling. Finally, someone is being proactive about getting PT. Averi really needs it!