Elmo Brace

Concentrating so hard the
 tongue is out

Soooo lefty arm, it doesn't like to cooperate very well (duh). For a little while Annabelle was doing well with just a reminder of "use lefty". Not that it was very functional but she'd put lefty up on the handle of the cart or up on her highchair tray, things like that.  More recently she's just been ignoring our suggestions to use it.  Jim and I also got pretty lazy about setting aside specific times to do therapies at home (gosh we were soooo good when she was a baby baby, 30-60min practically everyday. It got so much harder when she realized she could say no and just not participate...oh toddler-hood).

Go lefty!

In any case, now that we are getting older and wanting to do more things it's going to be more and more important to make lefty arm functional as possible.  Can anyone say POTTY TRAINING, hard enough to do by itself let alone without the function of one of the toddler's arms. So after talking with OT and a lil nudging from mama we got a brace made for righty to do a bit more formal lefty work. So while it's not full-time like "real" constraint therapy it is making Jim and I set aside special time to work on lefty. Since she loves Elmo and the color red we had her OT make the cast out of red material and Annabelle now calls it the "elmo bwaay"...

Workin hard with the
Elmo brace on

She likes to say it, then hates when we put it on. It makes a great weapon too and she took a fabulous gouge out of her changing table when she was wailing it around in a fit.... boo. She did pretty well with it on in our actual therapy session when she was given some snacks to get into her mouth (so my kid... easily bribed by food). She's not too keen on puttin blocks into the jar though. Next on our list at home is to try the snack idea!





"Elmo bway ooooff". Also, we are
ignoring the W-sitting while working with
the arm, thanks for noticing ;-)