Weekly Physical Therapist

Because Rayleigh qualifies for SoonerStart in her motor skills we opted to have one of their physical therapists come and work with Rayleigh once a week until she is 3 years old or until she catches up.

We got paired with Stephanie from Oklahoma County SoonerStart. She is awesome. I get along with her really well but, more importantly, she is great with Rayleigh and very patient. We set a goal of having Rayleigh crawl by November 2011 and pay more attention to toys presented to her.

Our current exercise that we work on is getting Rayleigh to sit alone. Rayleigh will sit completely unassisted for about 5-25 seconds but then once she realizes what she's doing, she arches her back to get out of the sitting position. This is something that we've had a hard time getting Rayleigh to stop. Anytime we do her sitting activities she will fuss and arch her back to try and stop us.

We've been working with Stephanie for almost 6 weeks now. She has shown us so many new ways to work with Rayleigh on sitting by herself that we never would have thought of. Along with sitting, we are working to get Rayleigh Bug to use her hands and arms to prop herself up. This helps her learn to sit on her own and is great for doing tummy time also. One thing that little Bug enjoys as far as propping goes is to get one of the couch cushions down on the ground and have Bug kneel over it. Knees on the ground, belly on the side of the cushion and chest/arms on the top. Then we just put a musical or light-up toy in front of her and she props herself right up to check it out.

We definitely see the potential in Rayleigh but we were really hoping she'd be sitting by Christmas. Who knows, there's still 2 days, maybe she'll pick it up as a Christmas present to everyone including herself!