More therapy

Charlotte has been making a lot of good progress, however she is still behind in all areas.  Her therapists are concerned about her slow progress physically as well as socially.  She still doesn’t use any kind of self safety precautions, and her arms and hands, although stronger, remain fairly weak.  Socially she plays independently and if she does seek interaction with others, it’s always with adults.  For her age, she should be seeking out other children and wanting to play with them.

At home, she sometimes will seek Cooper out to play with him, but it’s usually Cooper who initiates play.  She had a little friend at the gym, but she mostly followed her around, rather than trying to play with her.  The little girl also has quit coming to the free play.  She is starting to learn other children’s names at gym class, so I think that’s a really good start.  She also interacted very well with Maile when she was here, but again it was Maile initiating the play.

Charlotte receives 2 hours of speech, 30 min of physical therapy, and 2.5 hours of social/emotional/behavioral therapy every week (for a total of 5 hours).  They just increased her physical therapy from 30 min to 1 hour and took some time away from her behavioral therapy to do so.  Now they would like to increase her total therapy to 7.5 hours because they are more concerned with her lack of social interaction with her peers.  They are able to see it more clearly now that she has group therapy for part of her behavioral therapy.

We feel a little overwhelmed with additional therapy, since it feels a little like our whole week is spent in therapy for Charlotte.  We’re concerned that Cooper isn’t getting enough time to ‘be a kid’ with the running back and forth for Charlotte.  It’s so hard to balance the needs of both the kids!

I don’t usually talk about the adoption on this blog, mostly because I often forget that one of my children was adopted.  We’re just a family now.  There are also a lot of complexities given the nature of a kinship adoption, so I would rather not talk about personal family issues in a public forum.  Today we got news that Charlotte will have a younger birth sister born in early to mid June, as my sister is pregnant again.  It is unclear what will happen with the baby, but we hope that we can have a niece/aunt/uncle relationship with her and that Charlotte will be able to have a connection to her birth sibling.