Restraint Week, Day 2-4

Annabelle kept doing GREAT throughout the week! As we went on we did a few more structured activities to allow lefty to get a lot of active use. Mealtimes still seemed to be the best and most intensive "therapy" but there was still no fighting, which was really nice, meals just took forever!

We did a bit more baking, because Annabelle loves to cook (eat) and it takes so much grasping and rotating her arm it was one of the best activities we found. We played the Elefun game multiple times and she improved throughout the week in her accuracy and speed in picking up the butterflies and with holding onto her net.  Too bad she still didn't actually want to catch any of the butterflies. We also played the "Frog Game" where you pick up lilly pads, rotate them to see the animal on the other side and match 2 together. Then once you have a match you get to stomp on the "button" to make the frog fly into the air (Oh hey left leg therapy, we didn't forget about you this week!).  This game was a lot more difficult and she needed a lot of help as she had to isolate her thumb to get it under the lilly pad to pick it up and then rotate her wrist but it was still helpful.

We of course painted with lefty because Annabelle absolutely loves to get paint everywhere, the projects didn't last nearly as long as normal but lefty did get to get a bit goopy and I have a lovely lefty painting sitting on my desk now. We also did a lot of play-doh with lefty. Lucky for us Aunt Kris had sent some new play-doh toys for Valentine's day so that kept us very entertained. We have a few rollers and blocks with shapes to push into the play-doh which was good for lefty to open/roll, grab and push. Part of our new set let us make play-doh turtles which Annabelle really liked but when she wanted something new made out of the play-doh lefty had to grab the turtle and "smush" it so lefty also got a lot of squeezing/ strengthening practice.


It is also starting to get nicer out around here, finally. So we took her new bike from Xmas out for a spin. I couldn't get her off the thing! It was difficult to learn the steering concept since she couldn't even hold on with righty, she was concentrating very hard on grasping with lefty aaaaand I was kind of mean about the peddling and made her legs do a lot of  the work, which is still very difficult for her (again, hey lefty leg I totally didn't leave you out!). She got so worn out the first time we took it out she put her head down on the handle bars and told me "night night".  We took the bike out a few times and each time her lefty grabbing and steering skills improved and her peddling strength got a little bit better!

Looking pretty exhausted after an hour of bike riding

There are a few more things that we did throughout the week, I will post about those later. I have some good videos and really don't want to over do it in a single post!