We haven't gotten an "official" letter yet, but everything is in place for Emily to return to DSA in August. She's very, very excited and happy. She'll be in regular classes with some accommodations such as extra time for tests/assignments. She'll also be returning to Philosophy Club this Thursday, which she's also very happy and excited about. It's been a long, hard journey to get all of the school issues settled, and I'll never understand why it had to be so hard, but now they're settled and it's a huge relief. Her homebound classes are going well. We had the week off from her teacher last week and Em managed to get her first draft of her American Lit research paper completed and get through a chapter of American History (the Kennedy/Johnson years) and a chapter of chemistry (atomic structure and the periodic table relationships). Emily read and completed the section review questions for Chemistry in only about an hour yesterday.

Emily saw a new ear, nose & throat doctor a couple of weeks ago for her voice. Her voice continues to get stronger and more "normal" sounding all of the time. This doctor is supposedly the leading voice doctor in the country; just moved to Denver. He actually has a recording studio in his offices. He wants Em to start voice therapy with a specialized speech therapist that we'll see for the first time tomorrow. We'll do the voice therapy for a while and reevaluate whether or not another injection of collagen in just her left vocal chord is needed. Ultimately he may recommend surgery to shorten the left vocal chord a little bit, and he would be able to clean up her trach scar during the same surgery.

Emily is walking almost all the time when she's on the main floor of the house these days. She still needs one of us for standby assist, but her balance is getting much better. Every now and then she'll have moments when she just can't get her right leg to move, but that's happening less often. Em had another round of nerve block injections in her right shoulder last Thursday. The shoulder injections are always the worst. We saw a big improvement in her walking right away because now she's not pulling that right shoulder back when she takes a step with her right leg. The idea, as I understand it, is to block the nerves to the big muscles so that the smaller muscles can engage and give her more purposeful movement. The more movement/use she has of the arm, the better the signal from the arm to the brain, and vice versa, works, so that by the time the nerve block wears off she's got better control/use. Em has another appointment with the eye doctor on Wednesday. She's got consistent single vision now, but the right pupil is still larger than the left. We were at the Avalanche hockey game Saturday night and she had no problem following the puck in action - and there was only 1 puck! Emily really enjoys going to see the Avalanche, and we really appreciate the gentlemen who donates his tickets to the Craig Foundation.

All in all we had a busy, fun weekend. It was kind of nice to just hunker down at home during the bad weather yesterday.