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My son has low muscle tone! He had PT before he turned one, and a bit of speech therapy later (I think it was affecting his mouth muscles a bit). I gather that it's something that doesn't go away. He's able to do pretty much everything his classmates do, it just takes him more effort to get to the same fitness level. He's probably not going to be the strongest kid in class, and probably won't be good at contact sports, but he does other sports (swimming and gymnastics) and I think they help him build his strength.

My daughter is on the high ("strong") end of the low tone spectrum. She was an IUGR baby, induced a little before 37 weeks due to lack of growth and born at about 16 inches/4.5 lbs. We had her evaluated for early intervention just before her first birthday because she was only just then beginning pull herself to sit independently. She's currently 17 months old, and has made progress in twice-weekly (now once weekly) PT. She sat pretty quickly, and now is creeping, but not standing without holding something or walking independently. She still doesn't like to crawl properly on hands & knees (she's a very fast commando crawler). While technically her delay is minor, it has seemed like a long, slow process. Her growth in skills comes in spurts and lulls.

So far, she's not speech delayed - I was a little concerned because I was comparing her to my extremely verbal middle daughter, and had her evaluated recently, and she does not qualify for therapy. I was told that often low-tone kids' speech will lag until they're sitting/standing/walking both because they lack the diaphragm strength to push out the air to make sounds/words, and also because they aren't experiencing quite as much as kids who are upright/mobile...but DD3 has always been pretty communicative, even though she doesn't always use completely intelligible words. I do notice spurts in her words right after she has spurts in her physical milestones.

One thing we had a lot of success with in the beginning was kinesio tape (like you saw athletes using in the Olympics) - she had her abs taped for a few weeks to give her a "reminder" to use her core. that's how we made the jump to pulling to sitting and to crawling. To help get her standing more securely, she wore a belly wrap a few hours a day. Both REALLY helped.

@Mrs. Starfish: I'd love to see this, too! I think my daughter's low tone is causing slightly more delay in physical milestones than yours, but I'd still be interested to see how things progressed for her! I feel like I'm kind of in the dark as to when we "graduate"/where does this end.

@karen: Thank you for sharing! One thing I'm struggling with is trying to see "when does this end" - ie., when do we stop going to PT (originally the PT thought she'd walk by 18 months, so still in the "normal" range of when they'd ideally like babies to walk, and we'd graduate at that point...but we're approaching 18 months and I'm not at all sure she'll walk), what comes next if we keep going after she walks (will we have to work on jumping? Stair climbing?). I don't have any specific questions (since as you said, each kid is so different), but it's really nice to hear from parents of older children who have been at this a bit longer, in order to imagine what our path might look like.

@PinkElephant: Hi there! We also struggled with this and my MIL took Audrey to a special shoe store and spent like an hour working with an expert on appropriate shoes. We landed on these: https://www.striderite.com/en/srtech-emilia-shoe/12663B.html

They were pretty cute at that age! And the high tops supported her foot well. And I liked that they matched most of her outfits.