Das Boot

I mentioned a while back about Mia's AFO, and have now decided to show it to you. How privileged are my loyal readers?!?!?!?

The AFO is pretty handy. It locks her foot into a 90-degree angle to her leg, which prevents her from pointing her toe. As this is something she does quite often to help her walk, the AFO means she has to learn to use whole new muscles when she is walking - the correct muscles, this time. It also helps lock her knee into position, so when she wants to bend her knee, she has to use her quadriceps muscle like we normal folk instead of whatever the heck muscle she was using. This vexes her, as you can imagine.

She's been dealing with it, though. She wears for anywhere from 4 to 6 hours a day, and we're slowly increasing the time she has it on. She's slowly figuring out how to move her left leg when it's on, and although it has to be hot (it's plastic and she wears it with socks), she is getting less and less annoyed when I put it on and while she's wearing it. It's much harder for her to play on the floor, because it is pretty heavy and it's hard for her to roll and crawl with it, but that's another thing she'll have to learn to deal with. We're hoping that if she wears this for a year or two she'll be able to walk better because she'll be using the correct muscles for a change. Wouldn't that be nice?

Just another thing you never really consider - which muscles you use to walk. Norah is starting to cruise sideways along the furniture, and I bet she's not thinking about which muscles to use! Soon she will be zipping around, and we're still hoping this inspires Mia. We'll see.


(By the way - I'm aware that the title of the post translates as "The Boat." I just thought it was too fun to pass up as a title.)