We've had a truly blessed Christmas. Emily looked at Ken and I during dinner Christmas Eve and with a look of true joy on her face said, "I'm so happy." What more could we possibly hope for. Later at Christmas Eve mass she told me that God must have decided it just wasn't her time.

Christmas Day was a beautiful, snowy day. Both Emily and Hannah were thrilled with their gifts. Emily did a fabulous job on her shopping for the family - she picked truly thoughtful gifts for each of us. Hannah gave each of us certificates good for a day of personalized pampering that she made herself along with cards. Very sweet, thoughtful and generous. We had fun watching Hannah play her Wii games (Hannah Montana and High School Musical Sing It), had a lovely dinner, and finished the day watching the third Pirates movie.

Everyone's been asking how things went with the DPS administration, so I guess I'll have to tackle the topic. I don't think either Ken or I walked away from our meeting on the 18th with any real sense of progress. Emily has been re-enrolled at DSA, which is obviously positive. Now her home school teacher can coordinate with her teachers at DSA on her curriculum, which makes much more sense. We agreed to close out Emily's 2006 Spring semester with half credit - so she'll maintain her 4.0+ GPA, but she'll need to make up 2.5 credit hours. Hopefully we can accomplish that with the home school teacher over the next several months. There's absolutely no commitment that Emily will be accepted back at DSA for Fall 2008 - she'll need to prove she can do the work and DPS needs to determine just what accommodations they're obligated to make at a magnet school. We still don't have a case manager from the DPS TBI team, which means that we have yet to work with anyone who truly understands recovery from a brain injury. One concern was the emphasis DPS is putting on the cognitive testing that was done at Craig last August. It's very outdated and not even remotely reflective of where Emily's at now. We discussed our concerns with Emily's Speech Therapist and we've agreed that it's probably a good idea to do some updated testing after the holidays. In some ways there's no need to test - we all know she's making progress, but we need a more accurate picture of where Emily's at now before we meet with the DSA team in January. Of course any testing done now will be completely irrelevant by next Fall, but that's just not the way they see it. Emily writes almost every day. She's started a sequel to the fantasy novella she wrote last year - hopefully we can eventually get the DSA people to look at what she's writing and think beyond what they're obligated to do and how they can protect themselves.

For now, we count our blessings, thank God that Emily comes back to us a little more every day, and keep working hard.