BIG cleft team appointment

That's a bit of an odd title.  But it is what this post is about.

Yesterday, Jim, Emma and I spent the day at Children's Hospital.  We visited a series of doctor's associated with caring for Emma's cleft lip and palate repair and progress.  At the end of our individual visits, we then went out for lunch at an old favorite, French Meadow, and a walk around part of Lake of the Isles.  That was just for fun!  The afternoon was spent in a meeting with all the doctors gathered in one room with us.

It was really an incredible experience in many ways.  Emma's ENT covers the care of his patients in this manner, and as one such patient-family, we were the recipients of top-notch medical care provided in an efficient and effective fashion.  We are feeling VERY blessed today.

Emma met with an audiologist, speech pathologist, psychologist, nurse, dentist and then an oral surgeon and orthodontist.  Whew!  All in one day.

This would take weeks to accomplish one on one.

As anyone of you who has traversed long-term medical care knows, this is an incredible way to provide care for a person.

The final meeting involved all these people gathering in one room with us where together they again examined Emma's mouth to make sure everyone was in agreement about their assessments.  After this, together we laid out a plan for the year.

Tell me this isn't amazing!

The long and short of it is good news all around.

Good news:
Emma's palate is wide enough that we don't need to see the orthodontist now!  She does NOT need expanders.  This is wonderful news.  Wonderful because it saves her months of expanding her palate and wonderful because it means we are ready to proceed with the next stage of repair to her palate.

I'm thrilled and a bit teary to share that she will most likely have the alevolar bone graft surgery this summer.  The oral surgeon needs to review x-rays and we will meet with him to discuss treatment, but all indications are from the group as a whole, the oral surgeon in particular and our speech therapist who I spoke with today, that the summer will be great timing for the bone graft.

WOW.

Here is a link to a page that explains this surgery: http://www.chp.edu/CHP/Alveolar+Bone+Graft

Following the bone graft, we then have a bit of a break and sometime this winter we anticipate another surgery, which is still to be determined.  It will either be a surgery to extend her palate, tighten the end of it, or both.  We will know more about that in six months.

For now we celebrate that Emma will start school in the fall and be able to physically enunciate sounds that as of now she is unable to make without blowing air up through her nose.  Sounds like: s, f, v, p, th, ch, etc.

Obviously, a great deal of speech therapy and hard work will follow to train her to properly make these sounds, but she will be capable to making them!  A major victory.

Emma is simply amazing.

Truly, she is.  And I'm not just biased because I am her Momma, although that does give me a beautiful bias that I love.  Her ENT doctor, Dr. Sidman, is amazed by her!  Truly amazed.  Her did not expect the outcome she already has, much less how good it will be as time passes.  He just kept telling her how beautiful she was and how amazed by her he is!  Isn't that fun?!

Emma, of course, drank that up.  Blossoming little flower.  I feel like her life is a gentle watering right now.  God has insulated her this year in a cocoon to total love and care.  Every single person she encounters in our little world of family life at home to our church family loves her.  She is really and truly adored.  A.d.o.r.e.d.

Noelle, our speech therapist, and I have circled around again and again the idea that learning a language while learning the actual techniques for sounds is perhaps beneficial to the outcome of Emma's palate repair.  She isn't just learning how to properly pronounce words.  She is learning how to say many of them for the first time.  It is vocabulary AND new sounds AND proper sound production technique.

That unique combination makes for an eager student and one who is learning new patterns, not undoing years of compensated patterns.

Does that make sense?

In any case, having a front row seat to God's amazing story for Emma is breathtaking.

What a privilege it is to be her Momma.  We are privy to daily miracles.  We witness restoration and healing first hand.

Our sweet Emma Kate YuXiao.

We never knew the incredible grace and goodness God poured out on our family when He blessed us so lavishly and abundantly with YOU.

Blessing.  That is what you are.  All of you.  Every single bit of you from the tips of your cute little toes to the top of your beautiful dark-haired head.

We didn't know.  We just had no idea how very, very good this would be.

In all ways.

For anyone reading this who might contemplate older child adoption, I so encourage you as parents who have welcomed home a new older child.  This journey is so beautiful.  And while I long to have known Emma from her very first breath, I am so truly grateful for this path, too.

It is no less.  No less.

Isn't the Lord just amazing that way?