OT Report

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Lil miss recently started working with the Child Development Centre and saw an Occupational therapist for the first time.



Today I received a report on Lil Miss's progress.

Lil miss is showing difficulties in fine motor efficiency. She was noted to
have aversions at the ankles. She is described by her mother as being
clumsy, and is noted to have considerable difficulty with initial motor
planning on new activities. She catches on quickly with encouragement. She
is able to jump down about 18", hop on one foot about 3 times, and can walk
a balance beam independently, using arms to balance. ......

I'm going to skip a bit because I'm lazy and don't really want to type that
much.

Fine Motor Skills are variable. She has established right hand dominance, but
is still quite bilateral in her use of hands for activities......

She has more difficulties with bilateral tasks that require coordination of
both hands that require dissociated way to be functional.....

Lil miss is able to copy vertical and horizontal lines, and a circle. She is
imitating a cross but not integrating the horizontal line as it crosses the mid
line upright.

It was observed in our session that she is quite sensitive to some sounds,
and easily alarmed until she knows what the sound is. She also has some tactile
issues. She chews on her hair, a recently acquired behaviour apparently. She
tends to fall easily, and has motor planning difficulties, suggesting that her
visual and vestibular systems are not fully integrating input into the brain.
she stalls when presented with a new motor task, and then will imitate after
considerable delay. There are indications that she may not yet be integrating
left and right visual fields across mid line.....

On the profile Lil miss scores very low for sensory registration, indicating
that she has difficulty registering some forms of input to respond well to it.
This particularly appears to affect her ability to modulate her sense of her
body position in space. It also maybe related to her muscle tone and endurance
being somewhat lower. Especially her small muscles appear to fatigue quickly,
and she prefers to use large muscles for small muscle functions. Her processing
of auditory, vestibular and tactile inputs appears to be slightly less efficient
than normal. This would contribute to her clumsiness and difficulties with fine
motor planning at new tasks....

...Interestingly she has a very vague sense of what numbers are about. She
can only rote count to 3 reliably, occasionally to 4,and is unable to count more
than 2 objects reliably with 1:1 correspondence.....

Wow a tad bit overwhelming. I know I posted a bunch of this stuff already and I had heard it but when you see it sitting there in black and white in an official report somehow it's different.

It took us years to get to a place where I wasn't freaking out about apnea and bradycardia (where the heart essentially crashes), were she finally hit a point she wasn't turning blue anymore. I felt like I was out of the woods with her and now, well, this feels like a lot today.

I am just so grateful that we are able to get her some help now.