CIT Week 3 & The Cast is Off!

Week 3 of having the cast on flew by and before we knew it the time came to take it off!  This week we tried to focus specifically on his hand and fingers.  I did a lot of textures with him, trying to get him to use his pointer finger to touch different things…he only seems to have control over his thumb on that hand, so he mostly used his thumb.  I’m not sure what kind of feeling he has, as he gets older I think it will be easier to figure out if things feel different on his left hand than they do his right hand.  Trying to get his pincer grasp working is one of the toughest challenges…but even being able to grab something as small as a penny is a huge accomplishment for him!

I definitely feel that this therapy works wonders for him…even though it might seem a little like torture.  If we didn’t challenge him with things like this, his body would just shut that side down and he’d live in a one-handed world forever.  So anything we can do to help right now while he’s young, we’re up for it! 

I think he is starting to understand why he has to go through some of the things he does. He still manages to keep his silly side through it all.  Here he is telling me to take a picture of “his balancing!”  Miss Stacey would be happy to see that he was practicing his PT skills during his OT visit!

We rode over to his Orthotic Doctor and Dr. Jim was so kind to take his cast off for us.  This worked out great because Ryder is used to Dr. Jim molding his legs and then sawing off that cast when he needs new orthotics, so this was no big deal for Ryder (abby says her saw would have traumatized him for sure!).  I love when God sends little blessings down to us, like Dr. Jim offering to do this at no charge at all, just because he wanted to help out.  Afterwards Ryder felt free as a bird, literally, he kept flapping his right arm and even said to me “Mommy, I’m flapping so hard, will I fly away???”

So this weekend we’ve just been enjoying having 2 hands!  He has resorted back to fisting Lefty a lot BUT when he needs two hands for something he has been doing such a good job of remembering to include Lefty.

We are SO SO proud of him, he really has come so far.  Abby really wants to enforce his new skills and put the cast back on in a week for another 3 weeks.  Right now we’re fighting really bad eczema all over his arm, I think he had an allergic reaction to the casting material, so we’ll see if we can get that cleared up in time.  Keep ya posted :)