Am I mean or what?

As I've mentioned before our local childrens' hospital is also where the International Vojta headquarters are, so it makes sense that they also offer courses in Vojta Therapy for therapists (hmmmm may have to consider that in future).

Well a couple of weeks ago they asked if I would mind them using the girls as guinea pigs for one of their courses, of course very closely supervised by their lecturer who is also our new physio (lets call her Frau W), and I said yes immediately (bloody urge to always help) however I later regretted the quick nod. After a bit of dithering and after chatting a couple of times to Frau W, however I let the decision stand.

Today was the big day. The session started with Ciara being assessed and as usual she let her displeasure be known. She screamed herself purple, only pausing when I was physically holding her. Despite this, they managed to see most of what they wanted to see, they only didn't try getting her to roll. The assessment took most of the time with only a short treatment period right at the end, but it was worthwhile as Frau W explained more than she normally does to me, so I've picked up a few tips for the home sessions. Enya came second and charmed them all with her smile and babbling. She cooperated with them and only cried once. She also came very close to rolling onto her left side so we will have to practice that at home.

They had to try estimate how old the girls were from the patterns of movements and skills that were demonstrated and their final estimate was that Ciara was behaving like a 5-6 month old and Enya a 6-7 month old!! What I found most comforting was that Frau W said that they appear bright and interested in their surroundings and although both still have deficits there are no consistent red flags to raise the suspicion of Cerebral Palsy!! Please let us have got away without that!!

I'm now very interested to see what comes out of the neurodevelopmental assessment next week. We got a copy of the conclusions from the last assessment in which problems were stated that we had not even heard mentioned before (eg Enya has low truncal tone), so this time I'm going to ask that they tell us exactly what issues they find.