Just a few pics of Joan in riding therapy. Unfortunately, they only went for three lessons, before they cancelled the winter session due to the weather. She starts up again in April. She enjoyed it thoroughly, but was annoyed that all the horses were boys. Only one girl horse is in the program, but she is always given to a little paraplegic boy. Joan still misses her Stella - a therapy horse in Dryden she rode more than a year ago, but she still asks to go ride her on a regular basis. "Can I go visit my horse?" she asks.
Joan is doing pretty well with things. We've gotten her into some private physio, though Mike's benefits. It's nice to have input into her goals again - through the school, they have to stick with goals that will benefit her at school. In the private world, her goals are to ditch the leg brace, and learn to swim by herself, so we can put her into the Special Olympic program when she's 8. She LOVES swimming. She's completely fearless in the water, and considering her disability in land, does very well. But she still needs adaptations, obviously. It's hard to float when half of your body is tensed into a ball. It's hard to swim when one arm can't stretch out. The leg brace can be done for good as soon as we can teach her how to flex her foot up and down. Now, she can't move it at all. We have to strengthen the shin muscles in order to help her do it, and keep her braceless whenever she's out of school, to force the muscles to develop. The side-effect of the brace is that it creates a bit of dependency, by making the muscles atrophy. We've known that since she was fitted with her very first one, but it was a necessary evil, because she couldn't walk at all without it. Then she needed it for balance. Now it's more about stamina - she tires much faster without it, because her tiny muscles are doing the work that the brace normally does for her, which is why she's still supposed to wear it at school.
She's doing well at school, and is very eager to learn how to read. She knows all her sounds, and is a progressing well. Through testing, we've discovered she's an extremely visual person, and she does have some pretty mad skills. One day, she drew a picture of a princess. She turned it towards me, and asked me to spell princess, so she could write it on the picture. It stayed turned facing me, so it was upside-down to her. Yet as i dictated she was able to write "princess" backwards and upside down to herself, so that it looked like it was written perfectly across the page. And she did it without even thinking about it. She wants to be a fashion designer when she grows up (or a unicorn princess - she can't decide) so that's a pretty awesome skill to have. She loves clothes, and would wear frilly poufy dresses every day if I let her, which I don't. My parents often send her fashion sticker books, and fashion paper doll books, and each and every one is so prized, they've been taken for show and tell.
Anyway, better run. I'll post more pics soon.
