First Home-school, Now Home-therapy?!?

It's been over a month since Lauren has been able to go to her regularly scheduled therapies. I know she missed the day when she spiked a fever, and then she missed while she was in the hospital for 10 days. When she was discharged, the transplant team wanted her to stay at home (i.e. away from germs) until she could follow up with them in a few weeks. At that follow-up last week, her chest x-ray didn't look completely back to normal. It now looks like it'll be the first of July before Lauren's allowed to go back to the gym.

At first, I worried about her missing so much therapy. I worried that I couldn't keep her active enough at home to keep her from regressing. I was wrong. She's perhaps working as hard at home as she was when we rushed out the door each day to get to the gym on time. I don't have any official way of measuring progress, but I think the morning that I caught her climbing on the counter to get something out of the top cabinet is proof enough.

Over the past few weeks, I've been paying attention to what sorts of therapy activities that we can do at home. Most of these have been done without much prompting on my part. There are therapy balls piled beside our TV in the living room and a homemade balance beam in the middle of the carpet. Yesterday Lauren tossed bean bag cubes into a laundry basket, and today she tried to catch a bouncing ping pong ball in the basket.

Today I'll share my photo collection of Physical Therapy activities. (Some of the pictures were taken earlier this year, but she still does most of these things on a somewhat regular basis.)

Balance practice is a lot more fun in a tutu!

Practicing stairs in our one-story house

Bike riding on a rainy day

Big smiles for trips to the playground!

More smiles this morning (and a good ab workout on the swings)