brace yourself

this couldn't come soon enough. especially after ryan's tripping incident.

today we went and picked up his brace for his foot. and call me old fashioned, but for some reason i always thought it would look something like this:

image from yourprops.com

but apparently times have changed since 1950. although my desire to yell run forrest, run! hasn't.

ahem.

about a month ago ryan got fitted for a brace. it was quite an interesting process: first the lady put a double sock and a yellow train track on his foot and leg, then they wrapped some kind of tape around his leg that would harden. after it set for a couple minutes, she used her train scissors, and cut along the train track. then she cut one of the socks off and removed the mold of his foot!


pretty darn cool if you ask me. then we got to pick out what color we'd like and what ribbon we wanted. of course we had to choose the sport one!


so today we went to try it on and try it out! ryan did great with it on. it didn't even seem to bother him. it's designed to keep his leg straight and centered, and keep his toes up. and it's already working—he played around with a ball and was running and didn't even trip once!! the therapist was impressed!

so today he'll wear it for 2 hours. tomorrow, 3 hours, and the following day, 4 hours. if he doesn't have problems (redness around the foot that doesn't go away after 30 minutes) then he'll wear it as much as possible every day. he'll be able wear it around the house with socks and outside with shoes.


the shoe that the brace goes in needs to be a size bigger, so my plans were to go shoe shopping with him today. but coincidentally, i happened to buy two pairs of the same shoes in different sizes over a year ago. and they worked perfectly! thankyouJesus i just saved $35-$40!

wrong foot, ryry!

ryan will continue to have physical therapy on his leg and foot through the end of this year, and then we'll take a break for about 4-6 months and see how he's doing. but we've already seen improvements and now the brace will help even more!

so brace yourself, world. pretty soon this little man will be unstoppable and untripable!!