When you have a normal child, you can easily follow their progress through milestones. You know when they should start doing certain things. By this age, they should be doing this. By that age, they should start doing that. But when you have a special needs child, you quickly learn that those milestones do not apply to your kid. Take, for example, the milestones that a 0-3-month-old should reach:
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- First smile
- First laugh
- Make first sounds
- Control and lift head
James is about 6-1/2 months old now. Care to guess how many of those milestones he has reached? First smile? Nope. First laugh? Nope. Make first sounds? I think we can give him 1/2 credit on this one. He doesn’t make the normal goo goo-goo-ga-ga noises, but he does make some sounds. Okay, so how about control and lift head? Until today this was a no, but he finally did it!
James has been having occupational and physical therapy for a few months now. Stacy has also been working with him. It looks like all of that work has finally paid off. He hasn’t been able to lift his head unassisted…until today! For the first time he was able to lift his head on his own! This may sound bad, but we weren’t expecting him to be able to do much on his own. I was at work so if it wasn’t for the video, I wouldn’t have believed it. This may not be a big deal for parents of a normal child, but for us this was HUGE!
