Her own therapy

Blaise has an occupational therapist (who also acts as her physical therapist). Her name is Leslie and she's fantastic. She's been great at encouraging Blaise to work on her gross motor skills while having lots of patience with Blaise's stubbornness and a sense of humor about her tendency to circumvent therapist tricks like putting toys out of reach. Her assessment of Blaise's current motor development: "She's doing her own therapy."

To be clear, she's still behind on gross motor and we're not saying goodbye to Leslie any time soon. The thing that's changed is that Blaise is initiating a lot of the exercises that Leslie was previously coercing her to do. A couple of weeks ago, she would roll to her back automatically; now her "base" for play is her belly. She spontaneously pushes up onto her hands and knees to rock back and forth. She tries to pull herself up on the rail of her crib and to use me and Ben as climbing equipment. This is a huge change. We can tell that it's exhausting and difficult (to use Ben's words: "I can see her cerebellum overheating"), but she's doing it anyway. And once Blaise decides she's going to do something, there's no stopping her. Help us all.