Hazel's 3rd birthday

Liz and I were very fortunate to travel with Michael and Brooklyn down to Denver today to help Michael's little friend, Hazel, celebrate her third birthday.  A year ago in January her family received the grim news that her Ependymoma, the same cancer Michael has, had come back and was terminal.  The last time we saw Hazel was a year ago when we helped her celebrate her second birthday.  We wondered if that would be the last time we would see her.  We're thrilled that miraculously she is still with us and has made it to her third birthday.  What a sweet little girl she is.  Her body has been weakened by her illness and continued treatments, yet she smiled brightly at us when we wished her a happy birthday, and she seemed to thoroughly enjoy the card we made for her, signed by each of our children and with an outline of Michael's hand on the inside.

Happy Birthday Hazel!

We celebrated our ten-year anniversary a few weeks ago!  As part of our Family Home Evening that week we discussed how God has made it possible for families to be together forever.  That knowledge has been a particular source of comfort for our family over the last few years as we have been dealing with Michael's illness.

At the end of the lesson the girls got to try on Liz's wedding dress. They will make such lovely brides someday!

Liz's parents visited us for a few days last weekend.  Liz's dad helped me install some additional recessed lighting in the kitchen, and Liz's mom helped Brooklyn with her first haircut.  The lights turned out great, but the haircut came out a bit shorter than we expected.  Nothing that time or hair bows won't fix. :-)

We also had some fun playing with different hairstyles on Mikey during his haircut.

Michael's sign language skill continue to rapidly improve.  Liz and I are trying to catch up so we can communicate better with him.  I think a lot of his improvement has to do with his signing therapist, who is helping him bridge the gap between the sign language he has learned on the Signing Time DVDs and actually using those signs to communicate.  He loves it when people sign with him.  We've checked out some Signing Time books from the library, and as we point out each picture in the book and ask him what it is, he giggles and proudly shows the sign for it as if to say, "I know that one!"

Michael reading his Signing Time book

We were rather disappointed in the results of his recent evaluation for getting into preschool next year.  We really think he would do best in the sign language preschool where the teacher communicates both orally and in sign.  However, his evaluators didn't see him communicating much in sign language during their session with him.  We think it's probably because he was too busy exploring the room and playing with the activities there that he didn't realize it was time to "perform".

For his speech and signing therapies he sits in a specific chair and his therapists interact with him in a specific way so he knows that it's time to focus and work on his therapy.  He didn't get that during his evaluation, so he didn't stay focused.  The therapists and we are trying to get the evaluators to reconsider their results (or perhaps let Michael be re-evaluated) so that he can go to the sign language preschool next year if at all possible.