Anytime things get hard and I start to feel down, getting into the Why's and What if's, it seems there is one of you there. 14 people donated $832 in sponsorship for our walk which takes place on Saturday morning. 25 of my co-workers at Santa Rosa Consulting contributed over $3K to Gus's ABM Grant Fund. 4 family members and friends seeded the first $2300 of the Fund. It seems people are always offering to help us out and lift us up in prayer. We mean it deeply when we say we couldn't do it without all of you!
He is doing really well and making great strides. His last trip to Fort Wayne was last week and here is what our ABM practitioner, Jon Martinez, had to say:
He did and is doing very well. I
always notice changes everytime he comes back for more lessons. He is
using his left hand much more in play and reaching overhead quite a bit
which is nice to see. Transitioning from sitting to being on knees is
getting much easier for him to organize and its great to see him pushing
with both hands to move his weight back and up to sitting. Overall his
tone is much better which is another plus.
I've really noticed his muscle tone, or spasticity, has been much less obvious, as Jon mentions above. He still gets rigid and has involuntary movements but he can generally bring himself back into a relaxed state if he's not overwrought emotionally or completely exhausted. This allows for much freer movement and more exploration on Gus's part.
He's still struggling with getting himself from lying on the floor up into sitting. Often he'll be on his back and just tighten his tummy muscles like he's doing a partial sit-up. He grimaces from the effort, then cries and looks to us. He's done this so much that I got to thinking - something has to be rewarding about this behavior for him to continue to do it rather than attempting to come up into sitting from the side or from his belly, like his practitioners have been showing him. Then it occurred to me - just often enough one of us will take pity on him and get down on the floor to play with him. Most of the time we'll sit him up for that playtime. Oops! We're his worst enemy after all! We're repeating the very offenses that the folks at the Center in California worked to break out of us. D'oh!
His core support has improved greatly. He's able to maintain himself in prop sitting for longer and longer. He just doesn't seem to be able to shift his hips or move his legs to help maintain that position or to be able to wiggle around once he's there. And it seems like his arms are doing the right things on his belly but he can't quite get his legs under him to do anything resembling crawling yet. One of the other moms I've networked with has compared watching the progress in our little ones to watching grass grow. It happens but it's slow and takes a lot of time!
Here is a video that came from Maria's phone so pardon the poor quality but this is sure something we haven't seen Gus do before! Maria sent it to me while I was out to lunch with a co-worker and it was all I could do to not cry with happiness to see this kind of movement!
Please continue to think of us, send us positive thoughts, healing energy, pray for us if you pray. Each and every one of you is a huge blessing in our lives. We look forward to continuing to share Gus's journey knowing that his strides forward are possible because of YOU!
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