10.12.17 Meeting Chantel

Today we met Chantel from Kids on the Move, who will be working with us from here on out on meeting our goals and monitoring Bennett's progress as we work on his milestones and basic skills. She was great and Bennett took to her right away. He even gave her a few smiles! She was surprised he was doing as well as he is right now based on his assessment results. I explained that he's improved a LOT since we went off the Keppra and she took that as a good sign that maybe part of this has just been struggling with the medication side effects.

She took about an hour with us to ask me what we wanted to prioritize working on and what our goals were going to be. We decided that we want to achieve:
   - 2 words by 18 months (I think) that he knows the meaning to
   - Able to follow 1 simple direction like "pick up the ball" or "come to Mama".
   - Able to mimic a few gestures like a wave or blowing kisses.
   - Crawling perfectly.
   - Able to get in and out of sitting on his own and safely.
   - Have him evaluated by a Physical Therapist and a Feeding Specialist soon to make sure there are no physical issues we're dealing with.
   - Eventually work with a speech therapist, but not until we have a little more progress with his language skills--mostly understanding what we're saying.

We are probably going to attend their infant massage class in a few weeks where I can learn how to do it with Bennett, which is great, because I've tried infant massage with him before and he always seems to hate it. It would be nice to learn what kind of touch he enjoys to be able to use it as a soothing mechanism.

Overall, it was great to meet Chantel and she showed us a bunch of things we can try with Bennett for the next two weeks for his gross motor and language skills. Mostly, we just need to force Bennett to use his muscles to sit up, lie down, use his knees to pull to standing (instead of just lifting him), and some exercises to strengthen his core while he keeps his head up so he can get his belly off the floor when he crawls. Bennett seemed pretty exhausted after about 30 minutes of exercises, and he didn't enjoy it, so it's gonna turn playtime into more of a battle every day--and more proactive engagement from me, but I'm trying hard to commit to it! I want to help him as much as we can right now, and he seems to regress when we're not actively working on things, so I don't want that to happen. Hopefully we start to see some progress with the exercises.