Long time no blog post....

Wow, does Ava keep us busy!  She's the reason for the blog and the reason why I haven't posted in a while.  This little girl is AMAZING!  She's beautiful, sassy, stubborn, sweet, smart, I could go on and on, but I'll stop and go on to the details.......

We all just love her to bits, but I will say, as much as we had prepared for this adoption, here we are now, past the 2 month mark home and the other night Brian and I were talking and we agreed, we LOVE everything about AVA but we just never had imagined how life would be with her.  Stick with me on this, I will eventually get to my point.......

Well, long story short, we brought Ava back from China, knowing she had achondroplasia dwarfism and assuming she had hydrocephalus or water on the brain.  Within a few weeks of bringing her home, we had a routine CT scan performed on her to check the status of her noggin.  A few hours after we returned home from getting the CT, the phone rang, the caller ID showed it was a call from Children's Hospital which is where we had the CT, my heart sank because if everything is OK, you usually don't get a call from the hospital right away.  It was Sara, the Nurse Practitioner we are working with at the International Adoption clinic.  She said she had some news......which I figured.  Ava did not have hydrocephalus like we thought, I was stunned yet I knew something was up, I could tell by the tone in Sara's voice.  What was found was that Ava, at some time in her life had a massive stroke on the left side of her brain.   Brian and I were stunned.......

So, we sort of just let this news sink in a bit for a few days, then it was like, OK, so where do we go from here...  and here's where we've been.  We saw a neurologist who said the stroke probably occurred in utero or during birth, that the stroke damaged about 3/4ths of the left side of her brain, that if an adult would have had the same stroke they would be completely paralyzed and unable to speak, but that Ava was lucky to have had this so early in life and that her brain has found a way to re-wire itself.  The only deficits we are aware of so far is that her motor ability on her right side has been impared and maybe her speech.  In September, she will be seeing a doctor at UW Madison to find out more about how this stroke has affected her....

Well, time to go for now.  Every time I try to blog lately, I never have enough time to finish a post, so I've decided from now on to just post what I can even if I can't complete my post.........WBAS (Will Blog Again Soon) Nan :-)