Hellobee

As we close out this year, we have one more thing to celebrate and be grateful for in the Chocolate home — Juliet completed her last physical therapy session in Early Intervention and was dismissed from that program this month! She is still in Early Intervention for developmental, since she is still too young to qualify for speech therapy.  But the physical therapy part of her intervention is now finished. We are so proud of our little girl and this big accomplishment!

It’s hard to believe that a mere 9 months previous we were in the doctor’s office hearing those words, failure to thrive. She was trailing behind on many milestones; she was barely able to sit upright and still needed to tripod (use her hands for support). Fast forward to now and in her last physical therapy session she ran around the house, climbed up and slid down the stairs, scaled the ottoman multiple times, and in general moved around with the grace and adorableness of an eighteen-month-old baby.

Since she started walking at fourteen months, Juliet has made huge strides in her gross motor development. She was always an active baby in the womb and I think once she got those legs underneath her she really caught her stride. She started to climb shortly after she started walking and has attempted to scale almost every piece of furniture we own. Her wobbly gait has gotten much steadier and she now can easily race after Drake when the two of them are playing. She had been climbing stairs easily for months before she could walk, and has taken us all by surprise with the speed she can climb, beating us to the top with ease.

At her October therapy session, her therapist mentioned that Juliet’s legs turned in while she walked. This is quite common for early and new walkers, but it usually straightens out as time passes. Since her therapist knew her time with Juliet would be ending shortly, she recommended we see an orthopedic just to make sure everything was growing properly and would correct itself on its own before she dismissed us from the program. She just wanted to make sure Juliet was at 100% before she left the program.

In early December before what would be her last physical therapy session, I took Juliet to see an orthopedic. After examining Juliet on the table and watching her walk, he deemed her to be fine. He said a third of babies in the womb develop with their legs crossed across their bellies, and thus develop this wider stance of walking. He said in days past they used to put braces on the legs of children with these bowed walking legs, and for a long period of time believed that the legs improved because of the braces. Nowadays though they know that the legs, with or without braces, will fix themselves in time, mostly by three years of age. He said had Juliet’s issue been in her feet and not her legs, he would have probably recommended special shoes with braces which are still used to correct feet issues. But since hers were all in the legs and probably a direct result of the way she laid in womb, she was perfectly fine. If by three her legs still bowed when she walked we should return then for further analysis, but in all his years no one has ever returned at three.

With that good prognosis and her motor skills moving along as they ought to, her therapist felt it was time to release Juliet from the program. In nine months she went from barely sitting up on her own to running, climbing, and moving at the speed of a toddler. Her therapist gave me some milestones for when Juliet hit two (jumping, walking up stairs vs climbing with her hands, and kicking a ball) to watch and prepare for and said to call if anything ever changed, though she didn’t anticipate it would.

At the November session before this final one, her last hurdle was being able to walk over the gate bar for the baby gate. She had to stop walking and crawl over the bar. But at her last session she ran over it without even blinking an eye. The last metaphorical and physical hurdle in her progress had been cleared with ease it seemed, and Juliet graduated that day.