Montessori Monday–Feeling Yucky, But Still Doing Some Fine Motor Work

Dora is still not feeling up to par, so her energy level and patience with new activities have been a bit low. We’re not really sure what is wrong with her. It is beginning to look like she may have some sort of congenital defect of the urinary tract/kidneys. She has always had these off and on periods of running fevers and never really getting sick, but I thought she was just fighting off viruses. I even took her to the doctor a couple of times, but every time I got her there, she’d perk up and her fever would break, so I kind of just got used to it over time. She has always been what I have called, “high maintenance”, never seeming to be comfortable in her own skin. Now it appears, that she may have been fighting off  kidney infections all her life. In early December, she had a fairly obvious bladder infection, so I took her to urgent care and she’s not been well since. At this point in time, she has had three documented bladder infections in the last eight weeks, all different bacterial strains. She has been on antibiotics almost non-stop for the entire period of time. Then in late December, she had a seizure, so we spent weeks trying to determine if she had a seizure disorder. At this point, it does not appear that she has one, but that she had a seizure as the result of another bladder infection that we did not know about at the time. The photo above is of her getting an EEG, which she did not enjoy.  We just got the latest culture results back today and have an appointment in two weeks, where we will be figuring out with her pediatrician what steps to take now as far as further testing and seeing specialists goes.

She is not really laying around and still has periods of bouncing off the walls, but she also has periods when she sort of shuts down. In addition, she has started losing her patience with challenging things and will throw the offending work across the room. Also, as I mentioned last week, she just wants to stay home all day, every day. I am really trying to honor that wish. Being out and about is clearly not comfortable for her. She is needing to be at home with a lot of snuggle time and not stressed by the various sounds, sights, and smells of the outside world.

At home, she does stay fairly active, though with more sedate activities most of the time. She has really gotten interested with bead stringing all of a sudden.

She even went so far as to take some beads that we have for shape sorting and started stringing them on the leaf sticks from her Honey Bee Tree game. So I gave her some pipe cleaners and she really loved putting the beads on those.

She has also been working with scissors a lot. I made her some cutting strips and put stickers in between the lines. She enjoyed cutting those for one day, but has not expressed any interest since. She seems to prefer just exploring using the scissors in a variety of cutting patterns. She also has started cutting all of the cheapy beaded necklaces that we have into individual beads (the necklaces are like the ones people throw at Mardi Gras). It is no fun cleaning them up, but she is clearly building up some great fine motor skills doing it. We have several pairs of children’s scissors available to her at all times and she uses them all at different times. She started with My First Scissors, which are easier to hold for toddlers, as they do not use finger holes. She then progressed to Maped Koopy Spring Scissors. You can turn the spring off if you want, but the spring is nice at first, so the child only has to close, but not open the scissors. She has more recently started using Fiskars Kids Classic 5-Inch Blunt Tip Scissors, but did cut herself (no blood) once and has been a bit scissor-shy of them since.

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