At 9 months she started to stand and to walk little holding onto the furniture and eventually toddling along unaided. We joined a mothers and toddlers group and we would go along there once a week and met other families with children of a similar age we both enjoyed it but I started to notice quite a difference in the other children and Jay in the way they walked and also the way Jay would get up from the floor. She had this way of sort of walking her hands back up her legs until she was standing again. Jay also fell over a lot and when the other children went on to running Jay didn�t.
We took her to the doctors a couple of times and eventually he took us seriously. Then it was numerous trips to see specialists a lot of examinations, which Jay absolutely hated. The doctors would keep tapping her knees to get reflexes but it seemed as if Jay didn�t have any. She would scream and cry every time we would go to the hospital. Finally they did a muscle biopsy, which with the help of the other tests told them what Jay had it was Spinal Muscular Atrophy and they thought she had type 3. By this time Jay was over 2 years old and I was expecting our second child. Jay would have physiotherapy every couple of weeks for exercises to keep her supple and no tightness around her knees and also various walking types of exercises. We started her at a nursery and we didn�t treat her any different from any other child and apart from a lot of plasters on her knees we carried on as normal.
When Jay was 4 she started a mainstream school in our town and enjoyed it, they gave her some physio at play times and on the whole played a full part in most things they did at school. Daryl started going to the nursery Jay had attended and at first everything was fine. But he started to hold onto the furniture a lot more when he was walking and not really wanting to walk much at all. He had a toy sit on tractor that he would want to use more and more instead of walking it was a real effort for him. Next time we saw the physio I asked if there was somewhere else where Daryl could go to get more intensive physio. She suggested a special school about 6 miles away. We went for a look around and although it was very different than anything we had come across before we knew we had to get some extra help for Daryl to keep him on his legs as long as possible. It was hard for us to understand why Daryl wasn�t doing as well with his walking as Jay, she was still managing fairly well taking part in brownies and even doing a few dancing classes. She was still very unsteady on her legs and fell over all the time. One problem for Jay was the amount of children in the classes at her primary school they were very large and we felt she couldn�t get the extra help she needed and also the playground was very hectic and a little too fast and rough for her to walk around safely.
At around that time we went to a summer fayre at a local village school and we really liked the place the classes were small only 10 in Jay�s class and only 2 classes in the school. It was just what she needed. Daryl was 31/2 when he started special school and I was surprised how well he settled in even going to school on the minibus with the other children. On his first day they had a teddy bears picnic and I think that gave a good impression. After about a year Daryl started to use a rollator to help him with his walking, this is a walking frame with 2 wheels on the back to help him pull it along. I can still see him now walking for a little way pulling it along behind him and then resting his bottom on the back of it for a rest. Jay found the amount of writing she was doing a bit difficult and an occupational therapist suggested learning the keyboard and so she had some lessons at school to help and they were successful, but she didn�t want to have a laptop or anything because she didn�t want to be different from the others.
