When we first started seeing that Misha was comparatively not developing as fast as our other kids, I tried to explain it away as normal different-kids-have-different-timetables stuff. Of course, my wife didn’t listen to me. It’s that mothers intuition voodoo at work.
Misha has always been a really happy child, in fact he started responsively smiling really early. He doesn’t have tantrums like my other kids have had. He certainly can express himself when he is hungry, tired, or uncomfortable, however. We noticed early on that he had low muscle tone. He wasn’t able to do things that the other kids had been able to do. When we finally realized and accepted that he was not developing as he should, my wife decided that we were going to have to work a lot with him to move him along.
When he started to lag behind on sitting and crawling, we began doing hands on kinds of stuff, trying to get him to sit up by himself. It took him forever to start crawling. His arms were too weak to support himself. When he did start crawling, for quite a while, he would crawl with his head on the floor because it was too heavy to support with his neck muscles. Now he crawls quite quickly but still will crawl looking at the floor, not with his head up.
When our local early intervention group mentioned that we needed to start working with his pincer grasp, we tried a hand over hand approach, which was trying. We then started taping up his extra fingers with sports tape while he was eating cold cereal, but that was hard on the skin on his hands. Eventually, I got an old pair of his socks, cut two holes in each fairly close together, and would don them a couple times a day so that only his thumb and forefinger were exposed. It was such a good feeling when he finally figured it out.
