In Which Connor Works Hard

The director of our adoption agency's Thailand program should be home from her trip and back in the office tomorrow, so hopefully we'll get a call with an update about Ellen!  I'm going to be absolutely glued to my phone.  I always get a bit nervous about these trips, so hopefully we'll have some good news!

Connor worked extremely hard today; his occupational therapist at school said it was just about the best day she's ever had with him.  Then to top it off, he stood up in his stander through the entire Muppet Treasure Island movie!  That's about an hour and a half of standing, which is impressive.  I'm going to have to start figuring out a new motivation for him to keep standing pretty soon if he keeps going at this rate or else he'll be watching way too much TV. 

I'm so proud of him!

The combination of standing, all the hard work at school and a few short seizures completely wore the little guy out, and he fell asleep on our bed at seven in the evening.  That hasn't happened in a really long time, so you know he was really, really tired.  I'll take it a little easy on him tomorrow as he's likely to be a bit sore, but then we'll go right back to building up that time again.  I'd like to work him up to two or three one-hour sessions a day.

It's important that Connor get as much time in the stander as possible because it will do several great things for him.  Not only does it help stretch out his tight hip flexors and hamstrings, but it also helps his bones become more dense.  Children who spend a lot of time in wheelchairs and don't bear weight on their legs often are at risk of having their bones break easily because they aren't as strong as a walking person's bones would be. 

It will also greatly lower his chances of having pressure ulcers, which are caused when someone stays in one position for too long a period of time.  Luckily we haven't had any issues at all with bed sores so far-- probably because we never leave the kid in one position for long-- but the best way to treat pressure ulcers is to prevent them from happening in the first place so anything we can do helps!

I'm thinking that maybe once we have sunny skies again I'll start taking Connor and his stander to the park.  It's got some nice wheels, so the two of us could have a lovely walk.  We might get some weird looks, but we're kind of used to that at this point.  Connor loves walks, so I think that might be a pretty good motivator!

~Jess