We took Maria out swimming today. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her in the water and she has improved so much. We put a cylindrical float under the back of her neck and she floated there unassisted, kicking her legs now and then. She was moving slowly and I wasn’t sure if it was her leg movement or a current in the water. A couple of times she flapped her arms and got a good burst of movement.
In one part of the pool there was a waterfall. I took her toward it, on her tummy now. She seemed both excited and scared as we got closer. She’d strain her head to the side and I’d turn her away from it. Then she’d strain her head again and I’d turn her back. She was grinning all the time. We got fairly close but the water was pretty rough and she kept getting splashed so it was obviously a little too much.
She continued to have a low-grade fever yesterday and Cathy was going to call the doctor today. Then her fever broke yesterday evening and she’s been in much higher spirits today. She’s still sleeping a bit more than usual and still not eating as much as she should. We noticed her ribs are getting a bit pronounced so we obviously need to step up the calories again.
We’ve notice that she’s doing her gagging thing MUCH less often over the past 4-5 days. The few times she does do it, usually it’s the “I’m about to throw up” gagging rather than the “choking and lips turning blue” gagging. That’s progress of a sort. She’s been vomiting up air a lot lately and we’re not sure why that’s suddenly happening. Even though she’s feeling better, she obviously still has an upset tummy.
She’s NOT happy about going to thicker milk. She has to suck a lot harder to get it and she drinks very slowly, often pushing the bottle away over and over. It occurred to us that the straw cup may be very hard for her. We use special fast-flow nipples on the bottles but we don’t have something like that with the straw. We haven’t tried it since the swallow test, what with all the hoopla and her feeling poorly.
She’ll be at the resort two more nights. Then on Thursday she sees the feeding therapist and the Qi Gong guy. We increased the feeding therapy from 1/month to 2/month in preparation for the swallow study. We had planned to go back to 1/month because it is at the same time as her music therapy, and that has brought out so much in her. Plus it’s the only therapy that isn’t home-based and it’s a lengthy drive. However after this, we suspect the feeding therapist will probably want to stay on 2/month or even more often.
Of course, when she starts going to preschool in the morning (in less than 7 weeks!) all the therapies except PT will have to be rescheduled anyhow.