back to an old friend (sort of)

Here's Sophie riding the carousel at the FtW Zoo last Friday. Stephanie had the day off after enduring yet another Busy Season, so the two of them went out for the day while I stayed at home and worked on destructing our kitchen. Woohoo! Sophie apparently had a great time, was interested in many of the animals, but really loved the carousel and the parakeet house.

We have news on the therapy front. She is still doing speech/feeding therapy at Baylor in Dallas. We are on a waiting list there to get in to the inpatient program sometime in January. This program is similar to the one we did in May, but you stay on-site the entire 4 weeks (ugh) and it is geared towards weaning off of tube feeding. You work closely with a nutritionist in addition to the therapists. She mostly just uses the tube now for nighttime feedings, which we are slowly reducing, medicines and giving extra water. So hopefully this won't be too difficult a process, and we honestly wonder if we even need it.

In the meantime, we have also gone back to ECI (this is the state-funded program for kids with developmental delays) for some other therapies. They are going to work with Sophie on OT for balance issues and still walking on her tippy-toes, Speech therapy for language/verbal development, and also a nutritionist is available to come see us regularly. You may recall Sophie was getting help from them last year after she came home from the NICU. But we discontinued this program when she started "speech" at Baylor. You couldn't do therapies at ECI if you were also receiving it at another facility. But now they've changed the rules apparently, especially since the two different speech therapies will be with different aspects of oral development.

So we're excited about this. It should really help Sophie and provide us with another resource. The other thing that was cool about it was that on the assessment they did, she was right on track with cognitive stuff. This wasn't a surprise to us. She is really good at picture and shape puzzles and loves books.