Well. LJ's bottom lip could have practically taken up the whole room! See video for proof....right around the 11 or 12th minute. The Hungry Hippos was different from all the others right off the bat. For starters, Oscar wasn't there due to illness. The intimate nature of the session was less-than-appreciated by Mr. Noodles. The other thing that might have influenced his willingess to try oral feeding was his starting location. Usually LJ is in his bumbo seat. This time he tried sitting in his wheelchair with the tray attachment. As you will begin to see, these did not bode well.
Lewie the Lip_Hungry Hippos on 10.8.10 from Jenn S on Vimeo.
On the other hand, Lewis did attempt to pucker his lips to blow bubbles in a straw. He clearly had a lot more saliva production- probably because he was smacking his lips and moving his tongue in and out. The variety of foods we tried to get him interested in were orange slices (he liked these at school snack one day last week), mango slices, crunchy cheese soy crisps, wheat thins and water. He got the biggest kick out of pretending to wipe his mouth clean! I'm not sure what that says about the finality of him being "All Done!" but he was into it so we rolled with it.
Earlier in the week we had speech therapy. Danielle uses a method known in the speech world as the PROMPT Conceptual Framework. PROMPT stands for "Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets". This is a hands-on approach and thus the therapist uses her hands to cue and stimulate articulatory movement, at the same time helping LJ to limit unnecessary movements. This philosophy embodies that the therapist must always choose goals that will help the client achieve functional language and intelligible speech so that social, emotional and academic interactions with the world are possible. There is more information about how environmental factors, cognitive linguistic factors, physical-sensory, communication, social-emotional and behavioral outcomes all impact the child's success.
He's such an amazing little boy!!
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