Underneath it all

I recently read a great article about how many parents of a child with cerebral palsy tend to ask "When will my child walk?" but this is the absolute wrong question because the real question parents should be asking is "How well will my child walk"?  Wow.  I have posted many times about this exact subject and clearly now I realize in all of my writing I was focusing on the wrong issue.  As the article suggests, most children with CP do eventually walk, but there are several factors that will determine just how well that child walks later on in life.

One of the main factors that lead to walking correctly is through therapy and constant work and practice of the act of walking.  To assist in assuring Olivia is doing exactly as she should, she was fitted for a walking boot (we call it walking boot, but it is technically called an AFO) on Friday.  In addition, we also have on loan from the therapist a gait trainer which is a lot like a walker for an infant, but it does not allow Olivia to sit down which would pull the pressure from her legs to her bottom (which also causes bad habits for children with CP).  The acquisition of these two items in one week has been pretty overwhelming.

In a crowd full of children walking, running and moving along, Olivia's gait trainer sticks out like a sore thumb.  It was intimidating at first, this large contraption that held my daughter upright like a corset on wheels. I was so overwhelmed by it that I made sure Mike was the one to put her in it each time.  But after a few days practicing inside, today we were finally able to take her wheels for a spin in the driveway for the first time and Olivia had a blast.  She was moving, she was walking, she was running us over with the wheels.  She was smiling, she was laughing, she was the same Olivia she had always been, but she was moving with a gait trainer and a walking boot.

Throughout all of our exciting new progress with Olivia we are also knee deep in the middle of renovating our kitchen.  Throughout the week Mike, our neighbor and my Brother-In-Law have all pitched in to help pull down our old cabinets, the insulation, and the counter tops.  And this morning I woke up to one big mess in my kitchen floor.  The walls were bare in some places, painted in others.  The room looked disheveled, it looked like it was a complete work in progress, it looked like chaos.  It didn't look like our kitchen or that our kitchen had ever even existed.  Somehow with me entertaining Olivia, Mike was able to get everything cleaned up and during her nap we were both able to paint the walls a new color since we wouldn't have to go around any cabinets.  Miraculously, the overwhelming task was over and cleaned up with before Olivia even made one teeny tiny peep and began waking up from her nap!

Just about to start painting...

Sometimes I think tasks, work, jobs, LIFE simply seem more overwhelming than what it really is.  Tonight after I cleaned up our dishes from dinner (and placed them in the living room) I looked around that kitchen, the mostly clean, and now painted kitchen, and I realized that it had always been the same kitchen, the same 4 walls were still standing there inside the same house.  After we had cleaned up all chaos it was easy to see that the frame, the walls, the important parts were still there, albeit a different color.  So just like Olivia might have a few things to help her in her walking journey, these apparatuses are not who she is at her core.  Take them off, add them on, velcro, snap, button something into place.  No matter how overwhelming these things may seem, Olivia will still be Olivia.  So for now, we will continue to practice walking with her boot and her gait trainer because no matter how well she ends up walking one day, the most important thing to remember is that underneath it all, she will always be our happy, smiling, laughing, funny, charismatic Olivia.