Thank goodness I finally have an opportunity to update my blog! Mommy thinks I’m playing Boobah Zone, but I know she’s drowsy because I switched her regular coffee with decaf. She’s staring into space right now, so at last I have the opportunity to write a little something!

Yesterday Robin came over and we played speech therapy games again. I humored her by pretending not to understand half the things she asked. Aren’t I clever?? Then I ran around and screamed at the top of my lungs just to confuse everyone. When no one was looking, I sneaked myself a hershey’s kiss. I have a pile of them under my pillow.

My plan to dominate Mommy’s time and pilfer all of Ana’s toys is near completion. While Ana was in school yesterday, I began to quietly collect all of her stuffed animals into a secret bin I stashed in the upstairs closet. I wish I could spend more time on this today, but alas, I have to to go daycare. Such drudgery!

Oh no, mommy’s pointing the camera at me again. I must sign off for now…

Love,
Emily

I once again had the honor of presenting to a class of graduate speech pathology students at NYU last Thursday. I presented the same slides as I did last November, with a few updates to the photos towards the end.

The slides focused on my journey (as a parent), rather than Emily’s journey as a child born with a cleft. I discussed how we learned about Emily’s cleft (via our 19 week sonogram), how we found NYU (via another parent I met on cleftAdvocate), and the realities we dealt with during her first year from weekly NAM adjustments, to daily taping, to strangers staring, to surgery, recovery, more surgery, eating, not eating, ear infections, etc. etc. etc.

Last year I burst into tears when I showed the slide of Emily in the recovery room right after lip surgery. This year I choked up for a minute and moved on. I think time has played a big factor in putting that very difficult first year behind me. I still worry (daily) about Emily’s future, but I think it’s so important not to dwell during the in between times (in between surgeries and other major obstacles). A very wise woman, Debbie Oliver – the founder of CleftAdvocate, gave me that advice when I was just starting down the road to recovery with Emily.

And now for some cute pictures…

Emily strikes a pose on our new couch.

Emily’s wearing her daddy’s shirt as a painting smock. There’s red paint on her lips because I suspect she tasted the paint brush.

Ana’s looking up at a toy I’m holding over her head. It was my attempt at a photography-esque shot.

Well it turns out that Emily didn’t rupture her ear drum when she was sick last month (and I can’t believe it’s been another month since I posted). We took her for a follow-up doctor’s visit around January 8th and her ear was clear and the tube was still in it. So it was the tube draining all along that caused the gunk to come out of her ear. Whew. I feel like we dodged that bullet.

It’s news time! Emily’s language is growing with leaps and bounds. She’s very fun to talk to with her little peanut voice. She’s expressing herself more and more with different words and speaking in full sentences as well. She talks about her sister a lot and the two of them play together often. I’ve even heard Emily say, “Come on, Ana, let’s go in the toy room.” The “toy room” is actually our den which has become overrun with every type of toy imaginable. The two of them love to play in there together until someone annoys someone else and then there are usually tears involved.

Emily’s doing very well in school to. She had her first preschool (well, I guess it’s pre-preschool) evaluation about a week ago and she scored 5 out of 5 on most things and 4 out of 5 on a couple of things like communication, but her teacher said that the evaluation was taken in December and she’d be at a 5 for everything right around now. That basically means she’s ready for preschool which she’ll start in June. I was so happy to hear that she’s kept up with her peers in the areas of speech and communication.