Progress and an Explanation

I hope you had a great Memorial Day.  Thank you to everyone who serves to keep our country safe and free.

I am so excited with Buddy's progress.  He is sitting up and standing well enough that I let him stop using his special bath seat, which he had to lay down in.  I was afraid that he would fall over before, but now he is doing so well I let him try just sitting in the water.  He was so good.  He sat very still and didn't even start to fall over.  Also, he can stand up with my support to make rinsing easier.  I was beginning to wonder if he would ever get to this point, but he is doing so well.

He still isn't really crawling, although he tries.  On Saturday, he reached out and held on to me while "walking" his knees up to me so that he was kneeling in front of me!  For a little boy who was having trouble before, he certainly is making up for lost time!  On Saturday, he also started getting up on his knees in his crib so that he can turn on his mobile himself.  Such a smart little boy!

Since part of the point of this blog is to be informative, I wanted to explain why the sitting up and moving around is such a big deal.  At first, all I knew was that his pediatrician was not pleased with his level of physical development, but she said it might have something to do with his vision and not to be too concerned about it until after his early steps evaluation.  I thought, what does sitting up have to do with vision?  I mean, really, that seemed like just using his disability as an excuse for everything.  Our interventionist from the Division of Blind Services was the one who really explained it.  Normally, a baby hears a noise and turns to see what caused the noise.  Babies with poor vision turn and see nothing.  So, they learn to listen very carefully.  If you're moving around, you don't hear as well.  Buddy learned to be very still when he heard a noise so that he could hear it clearly.  This is great for hearing, but he was missing a key part of his development that way.  All of the turning his head to look at things would have strengthened his core muscles so that he could hold himself up and move around, but he didn't move, and so his muscles were weak.  We didn't know any of this, and we didn't know we had to make him move.  His vision improved to the point that he could see more of the things around him and he wanted to get to them, so he was moving more.  We also started making him do more of the work to hold himself up when we carried him, and he has just taken off.

We are amazed every day by the new things he does.