OT Visit

Kinley still sees her OT from Infants and Toddlers of Johnson County at our home every other Monday. Kinley continues to make great strides in her feeding, we just briefly touch on feeding at her appointments now. At her last visit earlier this week Kinley's feeding skills were at the 10-12 month old range. The exception to that is meats. Kinley still has difficulty chewing and swallowing meats. For the most part she will accept meat when offered to her, but she will just let it sit in her mouth for a long time before eventually chewing and swallowing it. The good news is that she does not cough or choke on the meats, she is just not in a big hurry to eat it once in her mouth. As far as self feeding skills, those are closer to a 6-10 month old, but that is mostly my fault. I have a fear of making a huge mess at mealtimes, so I tend to feed Kinley too much and not let her experiment with the spoon and fork as much as I should. Kinley is getting pretty good at her sippy cups now, and those used to get pretty messy, so maybe there is hope for me as far as letting Kinley feed herself more. Kinley seems to actually enjoy her sippy cups now, so we only give her flavored milk every once in a while as a treat, but for the most part she gets regular whole milk. As for what Kinley eats now, she still loves yogurt of any flavor, goldfish crackers, graham crackers with a little butter on them, spaghetti o's with meatballs, bananas, ritz crackers with easy cheese, strawberry fig newtons, sweet potato fries and vienna sausage. I try to get Kinley to eat veggies, but she is not a fan. She will eat mandarin oranges, peaches and pear chunks, but that is not really her favorite either. I guess I will just have to keep trying. If anyone has any good tips for getting Kinley to eat more fruits and veggies please let me know!

Ever since we started to focus more on gross and fine motor skills with OT, probably about 2 months ago, Kinley has been able to catch up and is now at the 10-12 month old range for both areas. That is pretty much right on track for her age! Great job Kinley, all your hard work has paid off.

When Kinley's motor skills started to take off, and her eating was well on track, we started to notice that Kinley is not talking as much as she used to be. Kinley used to say dada, but didn't really associate it with Kevin. We have not heard her say dada for a couple of weeks now, and she hasn't really picked up any new words. We have been working on communication skills for about a month now with little progress. We started off by trying to get her to say dada again or possibly even mama for once with no avail. So, we started to backtrack a little and went to encouraging gestures with daily routines or some songs like patty cake. Kinley will raise her hands when I say "up" and gesture to pick her up, she will wave, but not in context to anything, and she likes to take my hands and push them together to make a clapping noise, but that is about the extent of her communication skills at this point. At Kinley's last visit the OT watched her play and was a little concerned with how quietly she plays. Kinley's OT recommended that we have Kinley's hearing checked to rule out hearing loss as a reason for the delay in communication skills. Hopefully everything will be fine, but better to find out as soon as possible.