Perfect Timing!

Somehow Morgan seems to know just the right time to amaze me. The other night I stayed up late after putting Morgan to bed and was working on her birthday video ( I do one each year, a photo montage of the year along with her favorite songs of the year). While sifting through the thousands of photos we have from this year I also came across of few videos. The first video was one we took at the end of June when she first started talking. We tried to post it on our blog but it was just too long. Anyway, in the video David asked her to say a bunch of words she had just learned and Morgan would repeat them. It was amazing to see how far she has come since then. At the time she would say mostly just the beginning of the word and was still signing a lot of the words or doing a combination of signing and saying part of the word. Now, she is talking so much! She is only a few months behind now in her speech (she uses mostly 2-3 phrase sentences) and her vocabulary is HUGE! Her newest favorite word is UNIQUE (thanks to Fancy Nancy, I just love those books!). Anyway, I watched this video and felt just so great about how much progress she has made.
Then, I watched another video. This one was taken in July and was of Morgan walking in her walker. It was about a minute long (you can actually see it on our blog under July, "Further and Further Each Day") and in it she just motored right along. As I watched it I almost started to cry and really started thinking, "Oh my God, what have we done?" I was questioning why we have put her through so much since October with working on the knees because now she seems so much further behind. As I continued to watch the video over and over again and questions were swirling through my head, I kept thinking if we hadn't done all this would she be walking in her walker all over the place now instead of using her wheelchair? But then after about the third time through the video I started watching it more closely and paying attention to her legs. While she was walking her legs were not bending at all, she was just using her hips and side rotations to swing her legs through. And more importantly her left knee, it is hard to some to see in the video but as her mom I can very clearly see that left knee completely turning out in the wrong direction. After noticing this I began to feel a little better and thought, well maybe we did make the right decision.
Well, the VERY next day when I got home from work Morgan and I were playing in the living room. I put her in her walker as we have done everyday for weeks now and tried to encourage her to walk. This time I was bribing her with her ribbon toy she loves. Well, she amazed me! All of a sudden she started taking steps and not just one, but several. After about a minute she had moved herself over 5 feet!!! We immediately called David to tell him and Morgan asked to do the "Morgan Show" to see herself walking (I will have to do a whole other blog some day about the "Morgan Show"). After David got home she walked even more, this time from the couch to the tv, about 10 feet. It was so exciting to see and she was just so proud of herself.
That evening while Morgan was sleeping and we were doing her therapy David and I were talking about how great she had done that night with walking. I told him how I had watched the video the night before and had questioned the decisions we had made about her knees. David replied, "I never doubted the decision once, just look at her knees now." This is why we make such a great team; when one of us is questioning a decision the other one is not; when one of us needs a break the other one is there to step in.
Below is a video of Morgan walking, this one was actually taken two nights later. You can see in the video that she is still relying a lot of her sling seat to help support her while walking, but if you watch the leg movement (and knees) in the video compared to the July video you will see the huge difference. She is stepping more rather than just swinging a straight leg through. Hopefully this progress is just the beginning!