update

Yesterday we had Eme's in depth eval for all areas, including cognitive, motor, speech & physical. She scored above and beyond any child her age. 4 months ago she was failure to thrive and at a 6 month level and just look at her now=0)

However my concerns for her hip area are still there and very valid. There was a team of 4 doing her eval yesterday and after I stripped her naked and had her move from point A to point B they finally saw my concerns and gave her history more power and has set us up for some therapy to do core strengthening.

Eme doesn't squat like a normal child and her flexibility is a problem. She has low muscle tone in her southern region and needs some help learning to distribute the weight differently. They don't evaluate the quality of her movement, just that she can do it.

When we arrived to pick her up in China, her legs automatically fell to the side by her ears and she could maintain that pose. She had zero muscle tone and it was obvious that her legs were used to being separated. Her ligature marks from her time served in the potty chair were placed right below her knees, thus creating this wide spread and causing the problems that she has today. When she learned to crawl, she crawled that funky monkey kinda crawl and her legs always swung out. She walks flat footed, not the heel to toe proper walk and she can not walk without falling down or running into something and she does not have the muscle skills to change terrain. I loved that the therapist took all my concerns seriously and regraded her to qualify her for some therapy. Her history was extensively documented in order for her to qualify and we have some exercises that we will be working on at home with a therapy ball.

Since we've come home from NC, she has been repeating sounds and words more often. She can put 3-4 signs together like: (want more water please) or (want more milk please), but now she is beginning to add the words to them. She doesn't just sign eat, she says the word along with many other words. Up till now, she's been pretty slow to speak clearly, but instead took her shot at a parrot squawk. My girls is catching up at a fabulous rate and I'm really glad that I didn't bring her home and throw her into all the therapies that were requested of me by her pediatrician. All she needed was time. We chose to steer clear of everything until her anxiety levels were down and her trust in us was strong enough to move forward and now we don't have to spend all that time around strangers trying to catch her up because she did it on her own.

They also spoke very highly of her attachment, but let's be honest...a PT, OT & Speech pathologist really have no knowledge on the bonding and attachment process in the high risk child, that is not their field of expertise and I took their thoughts with a grain of salt. Just because my girl knows exactly who Mommy & Daddy are and is quite affectionate and acts just like a normal child, doesn't mean that I don't see a few holes in her attachment that still need to be plugged. We're getting there, but it's all a journey that we are traveling together.

& a big congrats to all the new parents (Dan & Doris)!!! So happy for you!