A success with the hands!

Each day we do lots of activities with Faith to encourage her to use her hands more. She can now wave her arms in the air, do dancing hands, play hands and shoulders, open shut them, hi five and wave so there is a lot she can do. But the whole concept of grasping is hard. She does so well at grasping the stacker cups and pulling them out individually and if we hold the cups she can put them back in. She can also have the cups on her hands and then clap them, very cute! But to stack cups or blocks on top of each other or pick up the shapeo shapes and put them in the shapeo is just to hard for her at the moment.

On Friday I was feeling down about Faith's sensitivity to food and I was thinking how I wanted her to move more quickly as I really want her to be able to enjoy food. Then, there in front of me, she picked up the little squares of play dough I had made and started dropping them over the edge of her tray. She even managed to drop a few in my hair when I was picking them up off the floor. How exciting. Faith hadn't grasped much before so this is wonderful. She didn't do much grasping over the next few days until on Monday when we went to early intervention and she went for it. She grabbed at little blocks, stars, little balls, anything that was a good size for her tiny porcelain hands. Just seeing those tiny hands grasp a tissue and be entertained by moving her wrist up and down and watching the tissue move with ease in hand. A breakthrough. She even put the tissue to her mouth to suck on and tried wiping her nose with it. A simple entertainment of a tissue.

Then yesterday Faith started picking up the shapeo shapes by two and dropping them over the edge of her tray. She found this very entertaining. We just need to keep up the practice and encouraging her to keep grabbing and wanting to explore. Another exciting event was when Faith started chucking the small coloured wire ball around. Faith's days are so much more fun since she can do more with her hands. All this amazing progress seems to be since we got her new pram, the stingray R82 as it has a tray and she can sit up and play. Such a blessing. As I go around the house doing things Faith comes with me and can see what I am doing and laughs, plays and feels part of the activity.