Hope turns 2! And pictures for the Grandmas!

 Hope turned 2 on Sunday. Between church and nap and small group, we actually had a really full day, and ended up squeezing in present opening in the 1/2 hour before small group. She loves books, although she likes the idea more than the actual reading. She's good at flipping pages.

 She also got some trains, and some animals to add to our animal collection. Carver enjoys putting the train track together for her, but her favorite part is pushing the choo-choos on the floor.

 We took cake and candles to small group, and let everybody sing to her. She was completely baffled by the candles.

 Fortunately, she has older sisters who are happy to finish the job!

She continues to plug away at milestones, making steady progress, though a couple months behind her peers. She has started talking a little bit, and has about 10 words that she can say umprompted, and a huge list of words that she will try to say if you ask her to. She is even putting two words together sometimes, like, "Mama, nana," asking for a banana. She is also doing a few key signs more dependably, and can communicate when she needs a drink or more of something. We are greatly encouraged by her progress in this area.

She is a proficient crawler now, and does a lot of knee-walking, so much so that her little knees are always red. Her real walking is still assisted and very unsteady, and it seems to us that her ability to balance is one of the biggest factors here. She tips and falls easily, even just standing and holding on to somebody, if she turns her head too quickly, she will likely fall over. She does have little braces on her ankles now, just to keep all her loose ankle muscles and tendons in line as she strengthens all those muscles for walking. While I do think they have helped, they have not made the huge difference that maybe we were hoping for. David and I are hopeful that she will walk by herself someday, but recognize that it will be a long haul to get there. I was able to obtain a temporary handicapped parking permit, which will make parking our big Suburban in New Jersey suburbia a little easier :)

Hope continues to get all sorts of therapy every week through NJ's early intervention program. That will be ending here in a few weeks, since we will be off to spend the summer in Montana, and will have to discontinue the therapy for that time. While she would still be eligible when we return until her 3rd birthday, I'm not sure we will continue with it. It is a lot of hours in the week for me, and I'm not 100% convinced that it has made a huge difference for her. She seems to do things when she's good and ready to, and not a minute before, no matter how much pushing and prodding the therapists do. She no longer needs to be followed by our neurosurgeon, and is pretty much out of the danger window for hydrocephalus. We know the signs like the back of our hand, though, and can always take action if we see any of those. She continues to be followed by a neurologist (although we don't go as often as they want us to :), a physiatrist (a new word for me, but he is by far our most helpful doctor), and an ophthalmologist.

As we prepare for the birth of her baby brother this summer, we are realizing that there are changes ahead for her, some already happening now (I can't pick her up as easily as I could a few months ago!). We pray that being pushed into big-sisterhood will help her continue to develop and not remain the helpless baby of the family

David and I are completely dumbfounded by her progress. God has been so faithful to us, when we in no way deserved it. As I have ached in the past two years with friends and acquaintances who have lost babies or have children with more severe handicaps, I do sometimes wonder why God spared us one of those tragedies. But, in His providence, He did, and our job continues to be to care for, protect, nurture, and train Hope so that she will bring Him glory.

Hope update!

Hope had her 18 month half-birthday on Sunday. I know it's been a while since I've given you an update, so I took some pictures of her during one of her sessions with a therapist today to give you an update with.

Hope is doing very well. She is continuing to make forward progress, although it's slow. She learned to crawl this summer, right around 15 months. Because her muscles are so low-tone, the quality of her crawling is not great. Her legs do the splits more than the should, and she has a hard time lifting her head while crawling to see where she's going. That said, she is a master of figuring out shortcuts for these problems. She will crawl a little ways, then sit up so that she can remember what she was aiming for, go back down on all fours and keep going. She has also mastered this funny little swim-with-her-legs move, which the physical therapist hates. It involves putting her legs in directions they should not be able to go, and pushing with them, so that she really looks like she's swimming with her legs. It's hilarious, unless you're a therapist. Then it's alarming.

She can now pull up on furniture, and is working on her balance on her feet. We are hoping that she walks sooner rather than later, as that will put an end to her swim-crawl, which really is not good for her ligaments and joints. She has not needed any intervention other than therapy to this point to help her mobility. She wears these funny constricting pants (or she's supposed to, but mom is sometimes lax in enforcement) that help keep her legs in the right position while crawling and climbing. In the coming months, though, it looks like she will need little ankle and lower-leg braces to help her walk. Her muscles are just so loose that her ankles kind of fold over on themselves. A brace will help build those muscles up correctly, so that hopefully she would not need braces forever.

Cognitively, she is also doing well. Her receptive language (meaning her ability to understand and respond to us) is very good, almost up to her age-level. She can obey commands, and understand a lot of what she says. Her communication back, though, it severely delayed. It is actually her area of biggest delay, and it has kind of snuck up on us the last few months. We have been so focused on her gross motor skills, that nobody was too concerned about her speech. Now, we're concerned. She does not make any sounds other than grunting. She grunts with a lot of inflection, though, and is able to make her desires known. Our attempts at teaching her signs have been unsuccessful, as well. She was recently evaluated by a speech therapist, and that hour was very informative for me. The part of her brain that's damaged is her cerebellum, and one of the things that is affected is her ability to plan. With gross motor, this means that her brain can't really figure out all the steps needed to crawl--she's had to be taught them and her brain trained to know what's supposed to happen. We think this is what's happening with her speech. She understands us, her hearing is fine, and she can move her mouth and make noise, but somewhere, all the steps to make the sounds come out in the right order, with her breath behind them, at the right time, got lost. It's called a motor-planning deficit, and that explanation really fits with the way she communicates (or doesn't), along with the other problems she's had. In addition, because her motor skills are poor, it will be hard for her to learn to sign. She one sign she has consistently is "bye", where she will wave. We will probably continue to do some signing just as another way for her to understand us (both visual and aural), but don't really expect that she will be able to sign back. All that to say--we will be starting weekly speech therapy in the next few weeks. The therapist will work with her facial muscles and the motor planning to try to get her to speak, and will work with us to figure out alternative means of communication. In addition, when she does learn to speak a little more, there is a high probability that her speech will be a little slurred, simply because her muscles overall are so low-tone.

So that's the quick version. I feel like that is really a lot of bad news, though, and the reality of life with her is that we are all still completely enamored with her. She so stinkin' cute, and she does the funniest things. She will squawk at Rose for taking a toy or getting too close to her personal space. She'll give kisses. She'll wave bye-bye when she wants to be done eating. She plays peek-a-boo. She greets Dad when he walks in the door. When she wakes up in the morning, she spends a few minutes in bed with me, looking at a book. Then Ellie will come in and get her to go play in the school room. Ellie will pick her up, and wait for Hope to pull the door open so they can leave my room. Hope will wave to me as she goes.

We continue to be so thankful for her life. We will face the challenges in the upcoming months with her, and look for solutions, all the time knowing that she is a gift from God to us, in ways we can see now, and in ways we may only know in heaven.

Hope turns 1!

Wow, what a year it has been.
We went from this (post here for those of you who don't know the story):


To this:


To this:


And now, here we are, celebrating her first birthday! Such a miracle. What a gracious God we have!

(And yes, I did not have a "1" candle. She got Carver's leftovers from last year. She didn't mind, though, and Laura did a great job blowing it out.)

Hope update!

Hope and I went and saw her new neurosurgeon today, and I've got great news to pass along! I'll start with a little bit of the back story, and then you'll think the news is just as great as I do :)
Since having her encephalocele removed, the only complication that we're looking for with Hope is hydrocephalus. Hydrocephalus is the enlarging of the ventricles of the brain (the spaces in the center of your brain where fluid is stored) due to an excess of cerebral spinal fluid. When this enlargement happens, the outer parts of the brain get smashed up against the skull, causing tissue loss and brain damage, usually global damage (involving everything--both physical and mental damage). The way that you can tell if someone has hydrocephalus is by looking for several warning signs: crankiness or changes in behavior, headaches, sleeping a lot, memory loss, eyes constantly looking down (sunsetting eyes), and forehead bulging (frontal bossing). In babies, because their skulls have not hardened yet, the first warning sign is often an extreme increase in head circumference, sometimes with few of the other signs. The only real way to tell, though, is to have an ultrasound done, or an MRI, which is much more precise. Hope and I had an MRI done before she was born, and then she had one done the day she was born. Since then, we have had 3 ultrasounds done, the last one being in November.

The treatment for hydrocephalus is to put in a shunt, a small tube that snakes between the lobes of the brain into those ventricles to drain the fluid. A tube then runs just under the skin of the neck and down into the abdominal cavity to drain that excess fluid. This surgery is life saving. A shunt will allow somebody who would otherwise suffer extreme brain damage and then death to have a long, normal life. But, the surgery itself is dangerous, with a higher mortality rate than the surgery Hope had to have her encephalocele removed. The shunt will also need care and replacing every decade or so. They can fail and they can become infected. Much like a lot of modern medicine, they are wonderful if you really need one, and a really bad idea if you don't.

In the 4 weeks after Hope's surgery, her ventricle size remained unchanged, which is when Dr. Young in Indiana told us that it was very unlikely that she would develop hydrocephalus and need a shunt. He said at that time that if she had hydrocephalus, it would have shown itself in that first month after surgery. We thought it was nothing less than a miracle that she would not need the shunt surgery, and were elated.

Then we moved and got a new doctor. We have spent the past 8 months being told something different every time we saw this woman. Based on her charting of Hope's head circumference, she was initially very concerned about hydrocephalus and encouraging an MRI to see what those ventricles looked like. Over the next few visits, she continued in this same vein, but each time the story was a little different. In December, I was told that Hope would likely need surgery in the spring, and that the doctor (in her brief office evaluation) saw sunsetting eyes and frontal bossing. She said that Hope's difficulty rolling and moving her head were due to the increased weight of having all that extra fluid in there. Then, in February, she said that the frontal bossing was mild, and hydrocephalus unlikely. All the while, Hope's head circumferences, which I was also taking at home every week, were hovering around the 90th to 95th percentile.

David and I were very uncomfortable with her waffling, her quick office evaluations of Hope, and her brushing aside of my concerns. We saw none of the external signs of hydrocephalus. Her eyes looked fine to us. Her head is funny shaped, but that can be explained by the fact that she has a very flat side from being positioned on one side for a long time. She was not losing ground developmentally, she was sleeping a normal amount, and she was not cranky. Her head is hard to hold up because she had all the muscles across the top of her neck cut! We really struggled with the idea that we would jump into surgery just based on a head circumference. The doctor told us to plan on doing an MRI in April, which we were fine with--after all, that would provide us the numbers that we need to compare with the MRI done at her birth.

After all this frustration, we also came to grips with the fact that she was not covered by our insurance, and that our insurance was not going to make an exception for us. That gave me the excuse to go out and find another doctor. I did some googling (since our doctor's office would not give us a name of another doctor, instead insisting that somehow, some way, our insurance must make an exception for us), and called a pediatric neurosurgeon at Columbia's medical center in the city. I explained our situation, and they got me in at a satellite office here in New Jersey that the doctor visits once a month. Hope and I went this morning, armed with reports from her birth and surgery, pictures, and copies of her MRI and ultrasounds on CDs.

The doctor was wonderful. His name is Dr. Feldstein, and he's an older man. He came out into the waiting room to get Hope, and then carried my bag for me while I carried Hope back to his office. He sat me down, asked questions about her history, writing down the answers by hand on a piece of paper. He then pulled up her most recent ultrasound on his laptop and walked me through the pictures. Then he measured her head. I watched, and he got the same measurement that I had been getting. He sat down and plugged it into his head circumference chart. He looked up at me, took her head circumference again, and then asked a few more questions about where the percentiles have been in the past few months. I told him how they had been at 40 when she was born, but had jumped up to 90 at some point, and stayed there ever since. He looked at his chart again, and said, "My calculations say below the 50th percentile. There is no way I would do shunt surgery on a baby with a head that small." I tried not to let my jaw hit the floor while he explained that there are several different manufacturers of these head circumference percentile charts, and with numbers this small, sometimes the variation is just that much.

I almost cried right there. I still feel pretty stunned. I asked him a few more questions, and he confirmed everything that David and I have been thinking. She is showing no signs of hydrocephalus because she does not have it. Dr. Feldstein even walked me through her ultrasound--showing me how her ventricles are large, but no larger than when she was born. They are not getting progressively larger. In fact, there is enough fluid around the exterior of her brain to indicate that there is no brain smooshing happening. He said that this is consistent with what he has seen in encephalocele babies--sometimes they just have a little bit more fluid in there.

He explained that he wants to see her about every 4 months for the next two years, just to check her, but that it is extremely unlikely that she would develop hydrocephalus. At age 3, he would consider her out of the woods. He started to walk us out the door, but I stopped and asked if he would like to have an MRI done, since that is what our last doctor had been recommending. His response? "I see nothing to indicate that there is anything wrong with her. Unless you and your husband have a strong desire to have the test done, I see no need to subject her to the dangers of the sedation and cost to do the test."

What an answer to prayer! I know that many of you were praying for us today, and I hope that God was glorified by showing Himself merciful to us. We have struggled to find doctors that we feel are actually concerned about Hope. More often than not, I have felt much closer to a cog in a machine than a person with a real, potentially life-threatening problem. I am so, so thankful for the visit today and the way God opened to door to find this doctor. David and I feel encouraged in our resolve to, in a sense, guard Hope from the medical profession. We are her parents, we know her better than anyone, and she was a heavenly gift to us. We may not have medical degrees, but we pray for wisdom regarding her and will continue to fight for her best interests. We thank God for our sweet baby!

Hope gets read to

Hope loves books:

Hope:10 months!

Hope had a big day today--she's 10 months old, it's Valentine's Day, she saw the neurosurgeon, and she got glasses!

Now she and Rose match.

Fortunately, Carver has a dress code at school so he doesn't dress like this all the time--

But Hope sure thinks he's entertaining.


The report from the neurosurgeon was very good. After a bad appointment in December, when Hope's head circumference was really large and the doctor pretty much assured me we'd be doing shunt surgery in the spring, today was welcome relief. Her head circumference is back down to the 90-95th percentile range, and she is still showing none of the signs of hydropcephalus. In fact, when the eye doctor examined her last week, he said that her optic nerve is showing absolutely no sign of increased pressure in her head. But he did put her in the glasses for farsightedness. The plan right now is to do an MRI in about two months and see what that shows as far as her ventricle size is concerned.

Physically, she continues to progress at a steady rate. While she still hates being on her tummy, she is learning to move around from a sitting position, and I'm still hopeful that she'll crawl in a few more months. She is very interactive--she laughs now, and plays games (like drop-the-toy-off-the-highchair-to-see-Rose-laugh) and babbles up a storm. We feel like she's even trying to imitate the sounds that we make, which is really amazing. Up next in the physical therapy queue is starting some baby sign language with her. We have been doing the PT for almost 6 months now, which means that next week she'll have an official review by the physcial therapist to evaluate where she is developmentally. It will be interesting to see what that says. While I continue to be somewhat frustrated with some of the doctors we have, the physical therapists have been wonderful, and their visits every week are fun and encouraging.

Hope is such a sweet blessing to us. It is a joy to care for her and watch her grow. She is evidence of the goodness of God in our lives, and we love her dearly.

Hope pics

I'm cleaning off my camera's flash card before Thanksgiving, and I found some good ones to show you! They're all out of order, but I'm sure you guys can figure that out :)
This is Miss Nancy working with Hope this week. Can you believe she's on her hands and knees? She did not like it. Otherwise, she's doing so well. Every week she makes noticeable progress, and her sitting up is getting so much better.







Isn't this a nice picture? If only I'd given her a haircut first...

When you're the fifth child, you have to put up with a lot of shenanigans.

Look who's sitting up! (kind of)

We have been doing PT with Hope for about a month now. I have to admit, I was not convinced that they knew anything I didn't, but it has been such a huge help! Two different women come, once a week each. Miss Kim works with Hope on fine motor skills, and Miss Nancy works more on gross motor stuff. Hope will now reach for a toy and grab it, with either hand. She's not putting them in her mouth yet, but that's what we're working on next.
And as for gross motor, look at this!
This was about 2 weeks ago--her first few days in the Bumbo. She gets tired quickly, and her body position isn't quite how Miss Nancy would like it (she's curled over a little too much in the bumbo, not have to use her back muscles), so we don't use it too much anymore.


This was last week, transitioning to the high chair. It turns out our high chair is ideally suited to her--it curves around her sides, giving her floppy arms the support they need. In the high chair, she can play with toys while having her arms supported by the tray. This gives her longer eye- and hand- interaction with the toys. If she drops one, she can still see it to pick it up. Getting her eyes involved is key--we want her to learn the connection between hands and eyes. In the high chair, she doesn't have to work so hard and sitting up, and can concentrate on hand movements with toys.


And here's sitting in a tripod position this weekend! This is so huge!! When we're working on posture, we give her toys that aren't quite to interactive so that she can concentrate on holding her back straight and head up.


Isn't she cute? I like these pictures because her eyes are straight. She really doesn't cross all that often--mostly when she's tired, and it seems, for the camera. But here you can see her looking at you!

Her weakest muscles are across her upper back and shoulders. She tires quickly lying on her back and holding toys in the air. Her neck is also very weak, and she hates tummy time. She will tolerate it for about a minute. My mission this week is to get her doing more tummy time, even if it's only for a moment at a time to try to build up some more of those muscles. The therapist and I also worked on carrying her facing out in the Moby wrap. While facing out is not ideal for most babies (it encourages a reverse curve in the back), Hope needs to strengthen those muscles. So we will be doing it for short spurts to encourage her to get her head up and off her chest, and to be looking around and compensating for my movements.

Her progress in the past months with the PT has been huge. It is a very good indicator for her future development. When we started PT, she was so wobbly that she couldn't grab a toy, and she couldn't really hold her head up without wobbling. Now she can do both those toys without wobbling. Just imagine what the next month will bring? Maybe rolling over, maybe sitting up all by herself!

Hope Update: 5 months

Hope is 5 months old today! Can you believe it?

She had her first physical therapy evaluation on Monday. It went well, and I liked the women that I was working with. The people who do the evaluation are different from the actual PT who will work with Hope, but even the evaluator gave me a few ideas of things to do differently with her.

Hope is a couple months behind, which is about what we were expecting. She came in at the physical and cognitive level of a 2-3 month old. However, the therapist made a point of telling me that she thinks Hope's cognitive delays are due to her physical limitations, and will go away as soon as Hope gains better muscle strength and control. In the picture above, she is reaching for a toy, which she has just started doing in the past few days. Her movements are very jerky, which the therapist said is to be expected with damage to the cerebellum.
Hope loves people and faces. She is very expressive when you sit and talk to her. She's vocalizing, and will make noises with you. She loves Ellie, although she responds differently to Ellie than she does to me. I think she somehow knows that Ellie's a firecracker who might explode at any moment :)

While her neck control is getting better, it was by far her lowest scoring area on the evaluation. She's just starting to hold her head up when you hold her to your shoulder, and even then she's pretty wobbly.

While it is clear that she's seeing us and able to track, her eyes cross a fair amount. The therapist thought that this might just be due to muscle fatigue. She looks at something for a little while, and then after a bit, her head goes down and her eyes cross. Poor kid--she's tired!



One area where she's clearly excelling is eating and growing. She's a chunk, weighing in at 17 1/2 lbs. I love carrying my babies around, but she's so heavy and so floppy that we're starting to think about stroller options that will work for her. If you have a stroller that you love that would work for an infant (since she is still so floppy), but doesn't involve a snap-in car seat, let me know!

Hope is a super sweet baby. She is by far our easiest baby, which is the Lord's mercy to me! She is happy in her car seat, she loves a bouncer that I've been borrowing from Delene, and she's happy to sit in her baby seat and listen as I do school with the big girls. While we still don't know what the days ahead look like, we're so grateful to God for giving her to us!

30 years and 4 months

I turned 30 last week. Somehow, with all the other things we've had going on in our lives this year, that just does not seem like a big deal. In more exciting news, Hope turned 4 months, and she's still doing splendidly!

For my birthday, David took us all into the city. We left the kids with the officers (all girls) of the house that David will be advising* (one of whom we had on good authority that she's a great babysitter!), and went out to dinner by ourselves. Well, with Hope. That's by ourselves, right? After we picked up the kids, we ran around the 15th floor of the Empire State Building a little, then took the kids over to his office to let them burn off some more steam there. Before heading home, we went to Greenwich Village and found some cannoli. It was a fun evening, and I'm thankful for a husband who can navigate Manhattan!

*To help its students bond, King's has a house system. This looks very similar to a frat/sorority system, except that every student is assigned to a house as a freshman. David will be advising the Queen Elizabeth I house this year.*

In other news, we have had a little bit of a rough start to figuring out Hope's doctors here. While we love the neurosurgeon that Dr. Young referred us to, our insurance situation it not ironed out yet, making the process of seeing more doctors and getting her head ultrasounds done very messy. I did go see a pediatrician with her on Friday for a 4 month check up and immunizations. Unfortunately, this doctor is not somebody that I will get along well with, and I left the office feeling very discouraged. It didn't help that I had all the other kids with me, and Laura had an accident in her pants close to the beginning of the visit. Once we got home, I gave Laura a bath, made a couple phone calls, did some online research, and found a doctor who will let me interview her before becoming an official patient. I will be doing that Tuesday morning, so please pray that she and I will hit it off, or, if not, that I will find a doctor that I am comfortable with. After that, we will be waiting until our insurance sorts itself out a little bit more before seeing any more doctors.

So, what's coming up next? We will be starting school on Monday. Carver doesn't start until a week from Monday, but the girls are pretty bored, so we're going to go ahead and start. We have not found a church home yet, so please pray that God will show us where He wants us here. We are having ClearNote friends come visit over Labor Day, and I'm sure I will be making more trips down to Philadelphia to spend time with the C's. We are getting settled in, figuring out grocery stores and shopping malls and indoor playplaces for rainy days. Slowly it's starting to feel more like home.

Hope has been doing a little better with sitting up and holding her head up, so I'm hoping to capture that with my camera over the next few days to show you. And I am working on a house tour--it's coming, I promise!

Last Indy Appointment

On Thursday, Hope and I made our last trek to St. Vincent in Indy. It's kind of sad--we have been very happy with the care we have gotten at St. Vincent (with the exception of Dr. Doom-and-Gloom, whom we never saw again), and would recommend it over other places in a heartbeat. I have also gotten to know the St. Vincent campus pretty well, so I'll have to work at learning the ropes of a new place out in New Jersey. We're thankful, though--thankful that Hope is healthy enough to move, thankful that David has a job he's looking forward to in the fall, and thankful for modern medicine.

Hope and I west up to see a pediatric neurologist, Dr. Pappas. David and I had met with Dr. Pappas in the hospital after Hope was born, but all he was able to tell us at that time was that he had no idea how Hope was going to do. He said that seizures and cerebral palsy were likely, but only time would tell. His game plan was to watch her developmental milestones to see what was going on with her brain. He said 3 months would be the earliest he'd like to see her to asses how she was doing. So when we went on Thursday, he went through a checklist of milestones, asked tons of questions, and examined her pretty thoroughly. His end conclusion? She's doing great!

She is not, however, 100% normal. For those of you who do not see her every week at church (and maybe even some of you guys who never see her outside of the Moby wrap :), she does not have the muscle control that she should. She cannot lift her head, and when I hold her upright, she will only try to balance her head for seconds at a time. She does not play with her hands, and does not reach for toys. She will not support her body weight on her legs like a normal newborn will do. When I talked to Dr. Pappas about this, he said that she has something called "poor tone." He said that it is to be expected with an encephalocele baby, and he glanced over it pretty quickly, like I should know what that is. I had no idea what it was, but I have been figuring it out since then. Between google and a friend at church who has three adopted children with this problem, I feel like I've learned a fair amount in the last few days. Poor tone is a neurological problem. It is not simply a case of weak muscles, where work-outs (or in this case, therapy) would help them grow stronger. Something in her brain has made it so that her muscles do not work the way they should. There are varying degrees of this problem, everything from slight clumsiness to paralysis. So for Hope, it explains why her eyes cross a lot, why she has reflux, why she's not holding her head up at all, and why we have given her the nickname "Floppy." The good news? It's not nearly as bad as it could be. She does track with her eyes, even though they cross a lot. She will focus on your face, and she smiles. She does move her arms and legs, but when she relaxes them, they feel like noodles. The other good news is that therapy can help this significantly. Lord willing, she will learn to sit up and walk just like other kids, but it will probably take her longer. This is something that she will have to deal with throughout the course of her life, probably in lots of ways that we can't foresee right now.

In everything else, Dr. Pappas was very happy. He said that she is doing much better than he would have anticipated. From here, we just wait and see what happens next--get her evaluated at 6 months and see if we know any more about how she's going to do.

Whatever happens, things will not change around here (in one sense,anyway:). The big kids love her to pieces. The biggest ones sit and talk to her, waving her arms around, laughing at her funny hair, and giving her kisses. Rose runs up to her in the morning and says, "Ope! Ope!" She was given to our family, and we are already overwhelmed by how much we have learned by having her with us. She will continue to cause us to grow in compassion and love, and we will continue to love her and care for her in the best way that we know. We love you, Hope!

Hope pics