OT: Week 1

A few days after Christmas break I received a phone call stating that there was an opening for OT every Monday…at 8am. Openings don’t happen very often, especially at the ‘Close to Home’ center (so we don’t have to go all the way to the hospital) and if I said no who knew when the next opening would be, so I took it.

For those of you who don’t know, wake up time is 8:00 at our house so it has taken a lot of determination to pack the night before, wake the girls up early and get to OT on time. The good news is that I really think it is going to pay off.

So, today was the first of 8 weeks of occupational therapy. Since it was the first visit Francis, our OT, mostly let me feed Averi so she could see what we’ve been doing and how she handles it. She told us to work on letting Averi chew on a half full nipple until she got some milk and then removing the nipple so she could swallow.

She also told us to use kind of a mini spoon to put rice cereal into Averi’s cheek so that she could take her time moving the food to the back of her throat instead of gagging on it when a large amount is sent straight to the back of her throat with a regular spoon.

I also learned that scooping the food off on the roof of her mouth is bad since it doesn’t encourage her to bring her lips together. So now we pull the spoon straight out, forcing her to bring her top lip down in order to get any food.