UPDATES 6-26-2008

Thank you for visiting our site and welcome to our weekly update on Lauren.

All that I can think is that Lauren must be feeling better these days because she is very active and seems happy most of the time. The only exception is when she is tired and is refusing to take her nap. I really hope that she is not trying to drop napping entirely! She has a definite opinion about what she wants to do during the day, but she has not used many words to help with communication in the past. She gets very frustrated and eventually has a "meltdown". The good news lately is that she has been much more vocal. She is trying to imitate us now when we talk. In the past, it was very hard to get her to talk on command, but she seems to be more interested now. We are not sure if it is related to her ear tubes helping her to hear better or just that she is feeling well enough to want to try now. The best part is that she laughs at so many things now, like her sister making crazy faces and silly noises. Her laughter is the best sound in the world for me to hear.

As far as her upcoming doctor's appointments, she will be getting her 2nd steroid shot around her g tube on Thursday, June 26th. She is scheduled to have more spinal MRIs on Monday, July 7th. She will be seeing the ophthalomogist for a follow up on Thursday, July 10th and we have her Early Intervention (EI) family meeting on Friday, July 11th.

The family meetings are very important because we get all of her therapists together in addition to the social worker, nutritionist and EI coordinator on our team to review the past 6 months and we come up with short-term goals for Lauren. Each person on the team has to do an evaluation prior to the meeting to assess her progress in their area of expertise. It is exciting to think how far that Lauren has come since her first family meeting in the summer of 2006. The fact that Lauren spends a lot of her time standing now is amazing, considering how curved her spine is and that it wasn't that long ago that Lauren could not sit up on her own. She walks forward with the assistance of her physical therapist twice a week, but she does not seem ready to try this on her own. She does side-step while holding the edge of something and she will lean back on the couch, so she can be hands free and hold 2 objects at the same time. While I am talking about this subject, I cannot say enough good things about the EI program. Just knowing that we have all of these trained people on Lauren's side to help guide us and navigate us through some of the most challenging times in our lives has eased the burden of making decisions related to Lauren. The best part is that they are as excited as we are about Lauren's progress because they have been working with her for so long now and know where she started.

We are so grateful for everyone's continued support. When people ask how we get through it, the answer is easy....All of the people who care about Lauren and how she is doing makes it much easier for us to keep moving forward. Thank you for reading Lauren's weekly update.