And the Verdict Is…

We’ve decided not to do another round of casting right now.  I’m not sure how long we’ll wait to do it again, but we think that Ryder gained enough strength from this first 3 weeks of Constraint Therapy that we’ll let him build on that for a while and see how he does.  His left arm is so much stronger now from constantly using it and he is a lot more confident when it comes to trying things with Lefty so we’ve seen enough progress to feel like the time wouldn’t be wasted if we decided not to follow up with a second round right away. 

He has such a good understanding now that he has two hands and needs to try to use them, that all we have to do is mention Lefty and he immediately takes it out of a fist, or joins Lefty in on whatever he is doing.  I think that in itself is so huge because now we can help remind him to use 2 hands when he doesn’t think of it himself. 

He does think and talk about Lefty a lot though, he gets so proud and will tell us that Lefty helped or that he used two hands.  He has definitely resorted back to using one hand often, initiating things with his right hand, and fisting when he is concentrating on doing something with Righty.  But there are so many more things that he IS doing with Lefty now like closing doors/pushing doors open, holding his cups with 2 hands, feeding himself if he has one piece of food in each hand, just a lot of things that he never would have been able to accomplish before the casting.

We’re very proud of Ryder and think we’re making the right decision in letting him have some time with both hands free to work on using them both.  Here are some pics of him using 2 hands:

 

 

And here’s a video to show that he actually misses having sword fight on!