GroshLink

Thank-you for your continued prayers and encouragements. It is such a joy to receive God's grace and love through our family, the People of God. One particular praise is the continued love and care expressed by Hayley & Ellen. They love their sister, have one-another to play with, continue to embrace their kindergarten community, and do not appear to be suffering from perceived neglect. At times they are tired, but much of that is adjusting to their daily schedule. Note: they sleep right through Eden's midnight calls for mom, even though they're in the same room!

Onto last week . . . Eden visited the facial nerve center (plastic surgeon) for follow-up. Each times she's there they can measure improved movement in the muscles of the left side of her face. So that's encouraging :)

The next day she had another hearing test. This was a behavioral hearing test where she is supposed to turn her head to the direction of a sound. If she turns, a toy lights up to reinforce her correct response. I was skeptical going into it that it would tell us much b/c I didn't think she would respond as they hoped. And she didn't, but they aren't able to say whether that's because she didn't hear the sounds or because developmentally she wasn't able to respond by turning her head. They also tried to gauge by her facial expressions whether or not she heard the sound. But that was very subjective. I know that she can hear. We just don't know if she hears anything out of the left ear. This week we will see the ear doctor and get his opinion. He can check out her middle ear too because other tests they did last week showed that her eardrum was not responding as it should to the stimulus. But that could be due to the residual effects of a cold she was getting over.

In normal baby development news--Eden cut her first tooth (Note from Tom: Hope this means back to more regular sleeping and eating habits)!