We finished!!!!

Ahhh... praise the Lord! We finished FPO! If you read any of the other entries, you know that it was rough... but we did learn alot. We finished out our last week, had our commissioning on Thursday, and left right after the ceremony. We were ready to be finished. It sure was sad to say goodbye to many of our friends. That was definitely the high-light of FPO for us. God blessed us with some amazing friendships... for Wes and I as well as for our children.

So, now we must hurry up and wait. At this point, we are waiting for our Visa's to come in. We applied a month ago, and we have just called and emailed to see if we could get an update. So far, we have heard nothing. As we told you before, they told us it would be from 1-6 months, which means it could be MAY before we leave?!? How crazy is that? It just makes it hard to plan. If we are not leaving until May, we really need to find a place for our family of 6! :) If it's just going to be another month or so, I think maybe my parents can put up with us for that long. :) Anyway, please pray for wisdom for us. It also affects schooling for the boys. If we are going to be here until May, maybe we need to enroll them in school?? We are still praying through all of that. So, do keep us in your prayers.

Right now, we have plans through the holidays. You can check the calendar at the bottom of our blog to see where we are going to be when. We have some appointments for Nathan in Raleigh just before Christmas, so we'll be down in NC the weekend before. Wes's family is coming up right after Christmas, so we'll be BACK in Raleigh for the week of New Year's. After that... we don't know. We'd love to make another trip up to upstate NY and see all of my family, and visit Emmanuel Baptist again. If we still have no word after the new year, we will probably do that. In the mean time, we are trying to get all of Nathan's doctor's appointments lined up.

We have had some issues come up with Nathan while we were at FPO. The teachers there were concerned about his fine motor skills and his retention. We had planned to do an Occupational Therapy evaluation after FPO was over (even before the teachers had mentioned anything), but they recommended we do it asap. So, we called our PT in Raleigh (she's amazing!!!), and she got us an appointment with her friend in the same practice. Nathan and I made a quick trip to Raleigh one rainy Monday morning for the appointment. Kim (from Abilitations) is the one who worked with Nathan, and she was wonderful. She basically said that Nathan has weakness in his hands and arms from not being exposed to school (Nathan never really did much pre-school). She felt like we could get him caught up on that, though, and she gave us some recommendations.

The doctors at FPO also felt like it might be important for Nathan to be seen by a neurologist. The teacher said that Nathan would zone out sometimes when she was reading a story, and they wondered if Nathan was having seizures. Now, I HIGHLY doubt Nathan is having seizures. The dr. said they were a possiblity in CP, but that if they don't show up by 3, they usually never occur. So, my guess is Nathan was bored, or maybe we do have some attention issues we have to work on. But, we requested that we get him in to the physiatrist who diagnosed Nathan with CP. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is with a neurologist and a physiatrist, but Wes and I had talked about having Nathan seen again before we left, just so we could get a re-evaluation on where he is at. A physiatrst will have some knowledge that a neurologist would have, but I guess he is more focused on the movement part of things? I'm not entirely sure. But, praise the Lord, we were able to get Nathan an appointment just before Christmas. We were thankful that it is a dr. who already knows Nathan, and the IMB doctors felt like he would have the knowledge needed to know if there was anything goin on with Nathan.

Also, during the OT evaluation, Kim noticed Nathan having trouble seeing the dots he was supposed to be connecting. She said he would move his head in all different directions, and then he'd try to put his pencil on the dot and he would miss it. It was like his depth perception was off. We decided to try without his glasses, and he seemed to do much better. So, we do need to find out what kind of issues we are having with his eyes. These type of issues will also affect Nathan in school!! Kim's evaluation also stated that he doesn't use the lower right quadrant of his eyes and that he has trouble tracking things. We have made another appointment with his pediatric ophthalmologist in Raleigh, as well. Please do pray for all of this. We just want to do the best we can for Nathan, so we'd like to know all we possibly can before we go to Spain. I'm so thankful for how God has worked all these appointments out!

We know, even though we are ready to get on the plane and head to Spain, that God has His perfect timing for us. He has a plan... who knows, maybe we will need all the extra time in order to get all of Nathan's appointments squared away. God knows! We will trust Him as we wait. Thanks for all of your prayers! We will be able to update a little better now that we have our internet back!!!!!! Yay!