Fussy but progressing

Maria's been kind of fussy the last couple of days. She acting like she might be starting her next round of teething. Plus it's been cloudy today and shunted hydrocephalics often get headaches during sudden changes in barometric pressure. We've seen her act this way on overcast days before.

She contines to do well in the stander. Her legs are stronger and she's got some muscle definition in her calves. Today at the speech therapist, she actually started to pull herself to her feet! Then she saw the therapist's buttons, thought "Ooh, shiny" and lost her train of thought. Cathy and I had both been thinking she's be in the stander for a matter of weeks, but the physical therapist was talking about "when she outgrows this one" so I guess it's going to be longer.

She saw her ophtalmologist last week; as long as she continues to improve, he figures there's no reason to change what we are doing. We had been a bit concerned that her left eye seems slightly misaligned, but he said it was fine. The vision therapist later explained that sometimes someone's eyes look misaligned because of the shape of their nose, but if you shine a light on the bridge of their nose and it reflects equally in both eyes, they are actually aligned correctly. She agreed the left eye LOOKS lazy, but she did the light thing and said they looked fine.

Although Maria's vision continues to improve, she still "acts blind". I was watching her one day, and I realized that she simply doesn't realize vision is important. It's more of a "hey, this vision thing is kind of neat, oh now I'm touching it so I don't need to look". She's very tactile. It will take time for her to realize that vision is actually useful.

I've also noticed that her hearing seems better. It's a lot harder to notice compared to vision, but she seems to react to noise more often than she used to. She likes her noisy toys more lately. Cathy finally called the audiologists since they kind of dropped us after Maria's last BAER test. We think that they were just so baffled by the result, they decided to ignore us and focus on the easy cases :). Maria's got an appointment next week.