Taking the Scenic Route

Your son sounds a bit like mine and you sound as confused as I did at that age. It becomes a little more apparent with age.

FWIW, ds hit all his gross motor milestones either early or on time (much the same schedule you listed). I *thought* he hit the ones with writing and such on time too, but didn’t realize until we were in therapy that he was ONLY writing with sidewalk chalk and on a much bigger scale then he was supposed to. He knew the alphabet, shapes, and numbers (and weird specific ones like the -gons and crescent ).

Some of the things that indicate lower tone are things that are linked to motor planning in ds, and that may be the case with your son.

One of the things that is more noticable is that his face seems rather expressionless at times, but particularly when he is overwhelmed. It happens a whole lot more in public than at home. He has problems holding a pencil and playing with the small legos. When he writes, he doesn’t write using his fingers/hand, but moves his whole arm. He has difficulty maintaining a tripod grip.

When we are out in public, especially when it is in crowds, he gets tired faster than he should (but does better if he is standing or sitting on the back of the tandem stroller we got). He won’t jump from a height without encouragement and/or holding his hand. He used to slam his body into walls, but has learned to do things like jumping on a trampoline instead.

When he puts on clothes, he has to lean against something or hold on to something to keep his balance. He isn’t terribly accident prone, actually unnaturally so compared to me and his sister, but he is also much, much more cautious. He loves the playground equiptment, but has to be shown how to use the equiptment sometimes. (and has to practice it for a while before he can do things well). He doesn’t pump his legs when he swings to help get him going. It took until the last 6 months for him to be able to ride his trike without us helping because the combo of tone and moter planning made it too exhausting for him. He runs, but when he runs he has to hold his arms in to help stablize himself. When he sits, he usually has one leg down and one leg up or in another very stable type of sitting instead of sitting on his knees (with his feet under his tush).

When he does talk, and he doesn’t talk a lot, it sounds like he has marbles in his mouth and he doesn’t enunciate very well. He also has problems with accessing language and most of his sentences are actually scripts (“I want ball please”) that get modified over time (“I want blue ball please”) and then have more modifiers added, usually with visual prompts (“I want 2 blue ball, I want 1 yellow ball please”) where we are now working on adding an “and” into sentances. Although he is getting much better at it, he still struggles with “You”, “I”, “Your turn”/”My turn” and other pronoun usage.

I don’t know if that helps at all, or if I answered your question. My son is isn’t considered “low tone” technically, but he is on the borderline for low tone. Some therapists claim he has it, some say he is just below normal, but not the level of “true” low tone.