After not seeing her for 3 days, Emily's PT and OT were really pleased with how much better she was holding her head and her trunk up today. Her right leg has relaxed so much that the PT was able to get her ankle almost completely flexed with just her hand - something that took me a couple of minutes with my full (considerable) body weight to do just last week.

In Speech Therapy we're having a hard time landing on a consistent way for Em to say yes and no. For everyday questions - are you hungry? do you want to eat in the dining room? would you like to lie down? - thumbs up works really well. I think her speech therapist is having trouble with it when she's doing word recognition/cognitive things. It's frustrating right now for everybody - probably Emily more than anyone.

In Rec Therapy today Emily started a pressed flower candle. She and I will finish it up during her free time this weekend, but it's going to be really pretty when it's finished. We need to pick our Rec Therapy outings for June by this Friday. Unfortunately, Em isn't eligible for the ones she'd really like to try - big thumbs up for hot air balloon and discover scuba. We'll probably start with a few trips to the park.

Emily has her swallow test tomorrow which will determine if she's having difficulty keeping thin liquids, like water, out of her airway. Once those results are in hopefully we can move on from the pureed diet. She wants to feed herself so bad, but the runny, pureed food just makes that so much more difficult. In addition to the kind of soupy foods, her appetite just took off yesterday and she's so hungry by meal time (even with snacks) that she tries to eat too fast and spills even more. I need to meet with the dietician tomorrow and try to get her a larger serving of protein with each meal. If the swallow test results are good, we might also be able to try and have her swallow pills, so the last reason for the G-tube would go away along with, hopefully, the G-tube.