Muscles and the XeroSox

I really try to make some posts informative because I know that there are some readers out there who also have children who are amputees and that's one of the reasons for this post.

Last summer when we went to the beach with my family we had quite the problem. Before we left we had looked at water legs that Bryson could use at the beach but they were just too exensive to buy for just a week at the beach. We knew that Bryson could get his prosthetic leg wet, but what we didn't think about was what the salt water and sand would do to it. He was only in the water once with his prosthetic and the knee froze and so for the rest of the week he could not bend his knee. This year we knew we would be headed to the beach again for shorter time and really wanted Bryson to be able to play in the water with the other kids, running in and out of the waves. We started doing our research for cheaper options and this is what we found. It is called the "XeroSox." This can be used by people with prosthetics as well as people with casts. I don't remember exactly how much it was but I know it was under $100. The size we had to get for Bryson was a little big and hard to get on, but we made it work. And I'm happy to say it worked. He was able to play at the beach - as you can see from these pictures - and when we left his leg still worked. Because the XeroSox that we bought was so much bigger than Bryson's leg we should be able to use it for a couple years.

I did also want to let you know that when we went to a water park this summer we let Bryson go onto the slides with his prosthetic leg on and it didn't do any damage to it. He couldn't leave it on all the time because water would get into the top and drive him crazy but it did help that we didn't have to carry him through most of the lines. It is so nice to be getting some of this stuff figured out now. It would've been nice for us to find some of this stuff out from other people which is why I decided to post about it. Hopefully, this will help somebody else out.

Now about the "muscles"...

Beau texted this picture to his Dad while we were on vacation. We didn't think twice about it. We never really thought about his muslces, although he loves to flex them until we saw this picture again when we got home. We were shocked to see Bryson's defined muscles. I guess we should've thought about it since he does over compensate for the missing leg with his upper body, but we didn't. Anyway, here is what defined muslces look like on a 6 year old.