skillsforaction.com

Erin is very hypermobile: he was one of those cuddly babies that melted and moulded against any available body. He was late in learning to sit, crawl and walk. In fact his first mode of getting around was rolling, later he learnt to scoot on his bottom and from there he eventually pulled himself into standing against the furniture and got up and walked at 22 months. 

Although he has achieved the basic milestones he has difficulty with activities that require strength and endurance, such as going up and down the stairs, running and he falls a lot.

Today we were working on his balance and strength when standing on his legs.

I had him standing on a 10 cm high step and bending down to pick up a 45cm gym ball, lifting the ball to chest head and bouncing  it back to me again. This is quite big ball  for a little fellow – but he enjoyed the challenge, and managed the task 5 times – on the sixth  try he was having difficulty lifting the ball to head height and started to tell me a long story to divert my attention from the task.

So this is a task he needs to work at – being able to pick up and throw a 45cm ball at least 10 times.  Later in the session I included other activities that involved lifting and carrying large bottles half filled with water.

To make the task easier for the arms he had to bend down and roll the ball back to me. To keep him going I pretended to fall over every time the ball rolled into my feet.  Erin's knee muscles are also weak. He can squat down quite easily and come up again – but finds it very hard to stop in-between. Bending down to roll the ball involves bending the knees about half way and he found this very tiring after the 6 bending down movements – but kept going because it was really funny when Pam made a big fuss about falling over.  By the time he had bent down ten times his knees started to shake a little: time to do something that did not involve the knees – because they needed a break.  So we did some crawling on the block exercises.

Erin can do many activities that require quite strong muscle activity  –  but he can only do a few repetitions.  Think about lifting a very heavy weight – one that you can only lift 4-5  times before your muscles start to shake.  Because of muscle weakness, activities that stronger children of his age can do easily, require a huge big effort from Erin – like lifting that very heavy weight. Because he is feisty little fellow he valiantly does what I ask him to do: but it requires a really big effort and soon he is tired and trying to find a way out of continuing.

However, with regular workout, Erin will strengthen up quickly and be lobbing that big ball at me repeatedly without getting horribly tired and shaky.