It has been a challenging month (at least for me), but I think today was a sign of better things to come.
School has been working well. It took a little while for me to take a breath and trust that things would fall into place, but things have settled in nicely. Molly has really enjoyed being at school. She is still predominantly interacting with the adults, but the kids are interested in her, so I think she will slowly warm up and figure out how to play with them. They completely rearranged the classroom to make it safer and more appropriate for Molly, which is more than I would have dreamed for. We are still trying to figure out how to make the "sensory table" (the table with plastic bins full of rice, water or whatever) accessible to Molly. The playground is also a bit of a challenge. She does not have any independent mobility there, so that makes things a bit more complicated to allow her opportunities to interact with the other kids (who are mostly running around in circles).
Molly's femur has healed nicely - thankfully!! She has had several falls since then and 2 of them have had pain that has lingered for days. One was last week when she fell to her bottom and started screaming and crying 'My back, I've hurt my back' and there was quite a bit of hard crying and a few longer nights (that were complicated with a chest cold). She is continuing to complain of some pain in back, but it has not been affecting her mobility. She fell on Sunday while using her walker and fell onto her face. I think she might have cracked a rib and also banged her head, but more than anything I think that fall was especially scary.
Today was a big day. Molly had her port flushed this morning, then her teacher and one of her aides came to the house to do an in-home visit. Molly got to take them on a tour of the house, which she really enjoyed. We now have a plan in place for the rest of this year and potentially for next year with school. Molly's itinerant teacher, Ms. Dawn, has been acting as Molly's aide in the classroom because there has been a hiring freeze. They now have found an agency that they can hire someone from for the rest of this year. This will allow us to potentially increase Molly's school days from 2 to 3 and then to 4. The thought is to go to 3 days once the new aide is trained and things are going smoothly. The rest of the class is there 4 days a week, so our goal is to have Molly go 4 days as well so that she is a part of the class and not just a part-time participant.
We have been making an effort to use Molly's bone stimulator everyday on her left Tibia and that seems to really be improving her mobility. She has been walking farther and farther distances, to the point that I often get her walker out of the car and she walks all the way to a store and then can walk all around! She has been getting more daring and taking more and more steps without any support. Today was her biggest/longest walking stint since that one video in her skunk costume. She took 6-10 steps unsupported and did so over a dozen times! She was so proud of herself!!
