End of January Update

Sorry I have not posted in a while!!! January has been so busy and time has just gotten away from me. Jackson is still seizure free...now 118 days! What a difference each day makes. We see so much progress each and every week. Little things that surprise us. For instance, in the picture above..he is on the bull swing at private therapy. Before, Jackson would never grab anything to hold onto. He would not hold a steering wheel, handle bars, a swing rope, etc. He grabs toys and uses his hands, but never really for defense mechanisms or to hold himself. When he had seizures, it really affected the use of his hands, and he was quite sensitive of his hands. Well things have changed. He now grabs onto his handle bars, steering wheel, whatever he can grab onto, and the latest he held the rope of this bull swing, on his own, even as his therapist swung higher and in circles. It was so great to see! I did not even know he could do it. He just did it...it clicked. "Little" things like this are so BIG to us. Now with therapy and no seizures, it is starting to happen more naturally for Jack...and it is so awesome! Then tonight, I went into the living room and he was trying to pull himself up on the couch from kneeling position. Another, huge "milestone" for us to witness and we appreciate so much!

He has not started crawling yet. We are getting so close. He is really flying forward to get things and move. We have been working on patterning crawling across the room with him and praising him when he does it.

We are also building up time in his gait trainer (walker) too. The gait trainer is pretty big. It makes Jackson look small...and he's not. It is a little hard for him to maneuver around the house through doorways. He is not that mobile on his own in it yet. It's hard for us to handle steering him, so I can only imagine him trying to get through certain areas. He is actually taking pretty good steps on his own holding onto our hands...getting stronger!

Jackson is still wearing his glasses for therapy...mainly occupational, vision and speech. I don't think I mentioned our new vision therapist. She is wonderful and comes once a week to our house through, Spring Branch ISD. Jackson loves her too. She brings all sorts of neat visual things for him to do. She actually thinks he can see fine, and wants to work on building his concentration and attention span. The glasses do seem to help with that.

Now, we just need to work on his sleep patterns a bit. He likes to wake up at 2 am and play, usually stays up for an hour. He has been doing this for a couple of weeks. I am trying to not let him take too long of naps during the day to see if it helps.

In February we will be have another EEG reading of his brain here in Houston with our Dr. We have not had one since Detroit. The doctors wanted an EEG, 4 months after surgery. We pray that all is normal in his readings! Maybe we can start to wean off one of the three meds. I am not complaining, we could not ask for better results post surgery, but it would be great to at least get off one of the meds as planned. Then in April/May, we will be going back to Detroit for a follow up visit and another MRI. It will probably be here before we know it!

Anyway, I will post some more pictures of Jackson this week! Thanks for checking in on Jackson! We appreciate everyone's continued support and concern for him.