Today, we met with our new occupational therapist, Melanie. She spent some time getting to know Gracie and evaluated both her fine motor skills and oral skills for eating. Gracie was able to meet all of the fine motor skills objectives at a 6 month level along with some of the objectives up to 10 or 11 months. Her oral skills are at the level of a 4 month old. We set a yearlong goal for Gracie to be able to self-feed with her fingers and a spoon to encompass both fine motor and oral skills. Melanie gave us some more ideas for developmentally appropriate toys that I'll be adding to Gracie's wish list.
Our short term goals for fine motor skills is to begin putting objects in a container and/or handing them to us. We are going to give her plenty of opportunities to try this skill out and offer lots of praise and encouragement as she makes progress. Our short term to improve her oral skills is to help her learn to move her tongue side to side for eating. We are to use a fingertip toothbrush to rub her gums and encourage lateral tongue movement, offer foods with a spoon at least once a day and apply slight downward pressure to her tongue along with depositing some food into the sides of her mouth. We are also going to buy a vibrating teether to help increase her awareness of her mouth and hopefully encourage biting to strengthen her jaws.
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