Our baby boy has just turned ten months and is learning to crawl – for now he can drag himself along the living room floor and once he learns how to lift his little behind off the ground he’ll be crawling like a boss.
We’re especially happy to see this for our boy because our now-five-year-old daughter never really went through this important developmental phase. Why some babies simply don’t crawl remains a mystery – influencing factors can range from the physical environment of their home to how much they were carried around as infants – but we suspect that our daughter’s Congenital Torticollis had something to do with it in her case.
Nevertheless I’m happy to say that in the years since I first described my daughter’s condition on this blog she has more or less been “cured.” Hers was a minor case to begin with but the symptoms were still evident: in addition to the tell-tale head-tilt (a.k.a “wry neck”), Marianne had issues with hand-eye coordination and her physical reflexes always seemed a bit off as a toddler. Simple things for other kids like walking steadily on a narrow beam, grasping small objects or pedaling a bike were a constant challenge. Last year she was prescribed corrective lenses for being far-sighted – which her doctor suspected was yet another outcome of her Torticollis.
Fortunately many of these symptoms have more or less subsided over time – it’s difficult to pinpoint how much of this she simply “outgrew” vs how much of this subsided due to the eight months of massage therapy we put her through at the Beijing Massage Hospital and the ongoing sensory integration therapy we now have her undergoing twice a week.
I’m quite confident that the tui na (推拿) massage therapy was effective and I’d recommend it for any family in a similar situation. The massage hospital in Beijing is housed in an old facility near Jishuitan but is staffed with doctors who know their discipline well and charges very affordable rates – the one caveat is that you need to speak Chinese as they don’t have any English speaking doctors, however Beijing’s international clinics and Eliot’s Corner also offer physical therapy if language is an issue.
As for Marianne’s ongoing sensory integration therapy (感统训练 in Chinese), we’ve been taking her twice a week to the Xiao Yue Fei (小岳飞) center at the Huateng Xintiandi Center on the East Fourth Ring Rd. The facility resembles the play centers you find in most local malls but is geared specifically towards S.I.T. – each hour-long session has an instructor working with 2 to 3 kids on their equipment (balance beams, slides, balls, swings and the like), which our daughter seems to enjoy.
Feel free to PM me if you need any further information.
