The Copass Chronicles

So, updates on the girls.

Lara is becoming more independent these days, saying things like, "Mommy, you need to leave my room so I can get dressed because I don't want you to help me." Whereas before I had to grow 3 arms every time I wanted to get out the door with the toddler who has CP and the baby who is really big for her age, now Lara just walks outside and waits for me by the car. I would envy my friends (just a little) that they could let their children play relatively unsupervised on the playset while they chatted on nearby benches, while I needed to stay right next to Lara the entire play time because of mobility problems. But these things are lessening more and more as Lara continues to progress and grow beautifully. I'm very happy to see the way she is walking so well, and especially that she has some control outside as well. This control helps her to be more brave to do things, like go down the slide and jump in the ball pit at therapy. And I can relax a bit more. This increase in independency has created a huge amount of progress in her walking quite suddenly, and we only use Lara's walker now when we are outside taking walks, or grocery shopping-in general, longer distances. She walks up and down the hall at church to exclamations of, "Wow! She's doing so great, when did that happen?" (in regards to not using a walker)

She had an evaluation at therapy on Friday. We set new goals every 6 months, but Lara keeps on meeting them well before the 6mo marker. Gretchen has specialized training with children with CP, so I feel that we have been especially blessed to have her as our therapist; she works closely with Lara's developmental pediatrician in Peoria. Gretchen has Lara do a variety of exercises but also measures her legs and hips and range of motion to make sure nothing is out of the ordinary for her. For instance, a common problem of children with spastic diplegia is that one leg may be growing longer than the other. I'm not sure how the problem is solved, but we don't have to worry about that yet. So far, everything's okay.

Here is a video of Gretchen. She is the therapist at the beginning of the video and is the one who is singing the song.

Claire is cool. Her diet is cool too. I've got her on a vegetarian diet, because, um, I don't really know why, but it sounds healthy and it's easy. I wouldn't know how to go vegetarian for the rest of us; I guess we'd eat a lot of peanut butter. (Dustin recently read the book "Everything I Want to do is Illegal," and now we need to buy grass-fed cow parts, and put some chickens in our backyard.) For breakfast, she has homemade brown rice cereal with beans, and sometimes mashed egg yolk. And fruit. (And sometimes what we are eating: pancakes or french toast, etc.) For lunch, she has yogurt/cottage cheese with flaxseed and veggies. For supper, she has tofu mashed with fruit, and usually whatever veggie we are eating, or a baby jar of something. But I often will give her pieces of what I am eating, because she much rather prefers to be an independent eater, and not be spoon fed. When she nears a year, I will give her meat.

Things are very different with Claire than they were with Lara, obviously. It didn't take a genius to see early on that Lara didn't move the way she was supposed to, but even so, I find myself enraptured with the way Claire can move. Her movements are very fluid and easy. I guess it seems more so to me because I've lived (through Lara) the last 3 years with spasticity. One day, I went to get Claire out of bed, and she was sitting up, playing with a stuffed animal. I was surprised, you see, because those transitions (laying to sitting, etc.) are a big hurdle for children with CP and we had to work on that so much when Lara was little, like 1. To see Claire suddenly doing it at this appropriate age makes me feel like I am a new mom, experiencing this for the first time.

(Don't worry, Claire, most of us feel unsure about the goatee.)
But don't get me wrong. Moms of children with CP have a great deal more work cut out for them, but it has been a rewarding journey. I feel good about the process we've gone through and I'm really happy with Lara's growth. She is so good at therapy and she just completely delights her therapist and doctors. Lara and Claire bring me a lot of joy in very different ways, and it ultimately has nothing to do with their physical abilities.

But anyway, life as a mom is busy! Well, maybe not busy per say, but certainly non-stop. But no matter how busy I am, with this weather, we put it all aside to PLAY OUTSIDE!

This evening I made a fennel-crusted pork with potato-fennel puree. Very yummy, and different. So, naturally, Lara wouldn't even try it. She just whinned all through supper until I shooed her off to her bedroom so I could eat in peace. I should have known better than to expect that Lara would eat something like that, so I made her something fancy when I finished my dinner: Peanut butter-crusted banana! (The "crust" is animal cracker crumbs.)

I later added a little pork for hair, and that seemed to lower Lara's inhibitions to eating it. "Eat the hair, Lara!"