Finn's Early Intervention Assessment

Today Finn had his Early Intervention (EI) formal assessment and it went really well.

As expected, he did well and scored in the normal range for cognitive function, social skills, activities of daily living (eating, drinking, dressing, etc), and fine motor skills.  He was slightly delayed in speech and of course had the delay in gross motor skills.

We're not worried about his speech and neither was the EI evaluator.  They know how laid back Finn is and how excessively chatty Zoey is (Finn can't get a word in edgewise), so they're ok with the fact that at 17 months he only says "Mama" and "Dada".   He communicates needs in other ways, such as going to the refrigerator and pulling on the door when he wants a drink, knocking on the pantry door when he wants a snack, going over to the stairs when he's tired and ready to go to sleep.  He shakes his head "no".  They taught us the baby sign language signs for "drink" "eat" and "all done" and basically said just let things be, continue to reinforce words to him in daily life and when pointing at pictures in a book, and he will talk in his own time.  That was my plan anyway, so that's fine by me.  In a few months if the words haven't come, then we'll revisit the situation.

Now the whole reason we got EI involved was due to Finn's issue with certain gross motor skills, in particular that he doesn't transition between positions, like from laying to sitting or sitting to standing.  We assumed early on it was because he never really crawled, he just went directly from sitting to cruising/walking.  So he sort of skipped out on a lot of that transitional stuff.

His EI evaluation today supports that.  So essentially, he doesn't have very good tone/strength in his arms, which prevents him from doing things like climbing, pulling up, pushing himself up with his arms, supporting any weight with his arms, etc.  Did he start out with an innate low tone in his upper body, which caused him to skip crawling and default to walking?  (A lot of babies are born with low tone, they outgrow it as they strengthen the problem areas).  Or did he develop the low tone as a result of the fact that he skipped crawling and went straight to walking?  No one knows, it's one of those chicken-egg scenarios.

But the bottom line is that we have to catch his arms up to his legs.  He has ridiculously strong legs, the kid can hunker down in a squat position indefinitely.  And what we discovered today is that he has developed all sorts of compensatory mechanisms to rely on his legs.  The evaluator kept saying how impressed she was at his cleverness in that department.  It was actually pretty funny.  We kept trying to get him in all of these positions that would force him to put weight on and utilize his arms, like picking up his legs and putting him in a "wheelbarrow" position or in all sorts of upward crawling situations.  He was SO fast with getting out of each and every one of those positions.  He has such strong legs that he would manipulate them lightning-fast in ways that I didn't know were possible to get himself out of having to use his arms.  Before today I just thought he didn't understand how to use his arms or transition.  Well that's not accurate.  He knows exactly what's going on, he just doesn't WANT to use his arms because it's hard.

So we should be getting a call sometime soon to set up weekly PT appointments for him until he builds his upper body strength.  I was envisioning toddler-sized dumb bells, but apparently they'll come to our house and work on different activities here.  They gave us a bunch of different things to do at home in the meantime, like assisting crawling up the stairs, making crawling forts out of cushions, wheelbarrowing him around the living room, and some other stuff.  They gave us new ways to assist his transitions from laying to sitting, laying to standing, and sitting to standing too.  This stuff will all build up his strength and tone.

Oh, one other thing we discovered is that he may also have a little bit of low facial tone.  He drools ALL.  THE.  TIME.  So I guess it's possible his mouth/cheeks may be a bit low in tone.  Or maybe he's just a drooler, I don't know.  I swear it's just because his cheeks are so darn pudgy that they weigh his face down, they're like jowls!  It's one of his most charming features.  :D  But the evaluator actually gave us exercises for that too, which sort of cracks me up.  We're supposed to have him use straws to drink more often (rather than always using sippy cups) and have him practice blowing cotton balls across the table to strengthen those muscles.

Overall I'm relieved.  I'm glad he doesn't have any cognitive barrier or genuine physical problem that's prevented him from doing these things.  It's good to know that he's basically just being lazy!  It's much easier for him to use his strong legs than build up his arms.  I think after a few weeks of exercise we'll see a big difference.