More Therapy And An Interesting Finding

For about 3 or 4 weeks, Michael has been receiving physical therapy in addition to his speech therapy. It just feels like it will never end with him! He's going to physical therapy because he's knock-kneed. We first discovered it about 2 months ago when my friend, Ashley, brought it up to me. She had noticed that his knees were rubbing together when he was standing, and I later brought it up to our Development Specialist, Sandra. Sandra was shocked to see this, as it was not present a few months ago. She immediately referred us to a physical therapist, and after confirming the need with our doctor, Michael started P.T. 4 weeks ago.

The amazing thing is that the P.T. is putting some pieces together for us. It looks like (and this is all in theory at this point. We're not 100% sure about any of this) Michael has a muscle in his body that is just too tight. It's a muscle that extends from his toes and up into his lower jaw. When he was in utero, he may have just been too tightly curled up and his muscle developed and solidified while he was so tight. So Michael has had to compensate for that tightness. This has led to his funny crawling, (he was a foot crawler. I'm kicking myself now that I didn't document this! Instead of crawling on both knees, he had one leg flat on his foot and the other leg on his knee, like normal. I'll see if I can find any picture or video to explain), his knock-knees, and finally, his SPEECH!!!!!

The tight muscle is preventing him from moving his jaw correctly. If you watch Michael talk, or look at some of his pictures, the right side of his jaw is really tight; it hardly moves!! The left side is also tight, but not as bad, it seems. We finally feel like we're getting some answers and figuring things out. We finally know what the problem is, and things are always easier to fix when you know exactly what you're fixing!!!