Holy Shirt! And pants, and shoes, and...

Clothing. 

I think it must be every hemiplegic kid's nemesis. Have you ever tried getting dressed one-handed? If not, I think you should try it one morning. I did it, and I can tell you that it's not easy. Now try getting undressed. Try to put socks on. Try getting your pants down when you need to go to the "potty" really, really bad. ACK! It's so frustrating! 

Curtis is just getting to the age where he wants to dress and undress himself. "No, I'll do it all by myself, Mom!" is something I hear on a daily basis. Multiple times a day, actually. Sometimes I love to hear it. It means he's becoming more independent, that he wants to try more things and do more on his own--that's a good thing! But other times, like when we're trying to hurry out the door and he wants to put his own socks on and I know it's going to take eleventybillion hours to do it, I have to admit that I just sort of wish he'd let me do it. But I have to let him try. He's a big boy now. He has to know how to do these things.

There's kind of a lot of little things that these kids of ours have to know how to do. I mean, think about it. Underwear, shirt, pants, socks, shoes--all going the right direction or put on the proper foot. And don't get me started on buttons, snaps, those little hook things that they have on some pants instead of buttons or snaps, zippers, shoelaces, velcro, blaaaaaaaaaaomgsomanylittlethingsmyheadisgoingtoexplodehowwillheeverlearnitall! Phew.

So, I made a little list of the things he CAN do. And I'm pretty impressed by it, actually. For an almost 5-year-old with a functional right arm and only a "helper" for his left hand/arm, I think this is pretty darn good!

As of today, this is what he can do all by himself:

• put underwear on (OK, sometimes they're backwards, but we're cool with that) and take them off
• put elastic waistband pants or shorts on (again...backwards is OK here--we switch them sometimes before leaving the house) and take them off
• pull elastic waistband pants or shorts up and down well enough and fast enough to go potty on his own (not going to lie--I have to clean the bathroom floor more than I care to, but he IS a boy so I'd probably be doing that anyway)
• take socks off
• take shoes off

And this is what he can do with a little help:

• put socks on (this is pretty huge--socks are really hard to put on, especially when they're so small!)
• put a shirt on and take a shirt off (again--really hard to do one-handed or even with a helper hand)
• put slip-on shoes on (he can get the right one on, but not the left)

These are things that we work on daily. I wish we could say that we work on ALL of these things EVERY day, but, honestly, there just aren't enough hours in the day sometimes. Luckily, he does work on most of these things every Wednesday morning in occupational therapy at CCS (California Children's Services). Just to explain, his occupational therapist at CCS helps him work on what they call "medically relevant" things--like dressing himself. Her main purpose is to work on self-help skills or "activities of daily living". So she does different activities with Curtis to improve the function of his left hand and arm so he can do things like put on his own shirt and zip his own zipper--stuff like that. This differs from the occupational therapy that he gets twice/week through the school district, which is, obviously, geared toward helping him be successful in a learning environment.

I thought I'd include a little video that I took of Curtis practicing putting a shirt on last week at therapy. His therapist usually starts every session with him putting a shirt on. Sometimes she gets him to put shorts on and we also usually have him take his socks and shoes off and then put them back on. This will give you a good idea of just how hard he works. It might not look like much...but it's huge progress! (And notice how patient he is with himself, I love it.)

Note: we really aren't supposed to video in there, but no one else was in the shot, so I was given the OK. 

Also, there is lots of background noise in the video so you might just want to mute it--there were other people in the room that were talking REALLY LOUD and we were saying nothing, really, so if you mute you won't miss anything.

Enjoy!