Another goodbye and a little more info

First, we lost another amazing family member this month. Grandma Bell was 98 years young and lived a joyful diverse life. We will miss her terribly! 

Next, we wanted to share a little more about Milo and the special need we alluded to earlier. 
When we started this process, we knew that our kiddo was going to have a special need. As I explained here, the China "healthy child" program has a 6-7 year waiting list. Not only were we not interested in the wait, we felt called to extend our comfort zone and adopt a "special needs" child.

Milo was born with a unilateral cleft lip and palate. As you can tell from his picture, his lip has already been repaired and actually repaired really well. We do have a pre-surgical picture of him that we haven't shared widely yet. God perfectly formed every inch of our son and we think he is beautiful in all ways. However, we are already starting to feel a parental protectiveness about him and one of the lessons we learned in our pre-adoptive training was that we should be sensitive about what we share before he has a voice to tell us what he is comfortable with. So for now it is a picture we are keeping close. We wish we had been there to comfort him during his lip repair, but we are glad that it seems to have been corrected well and it will be one less surgery he will have to have when he comes home.

His palate is still unrepaired and he will need to have surgery at some point. It is necessary to repair as it impedes his ability to eat and speak. When it will be done depends on how well he is doing nutritionally and emotionally. It could be done right away or we may choose to wait several months. We found out shortly after being matched that there is a cleft clinic with a team of surgeons, nurses and various therapists very close to us and we are SO thankful for that. He will be able to have his surgery and follow up care within 20 minutes of our home. He will also most likely need speech therapy and possibly another surgery as he grows. We feel very confident with our local cleft team and honored that we will get to be his support going forward.

Here are a few links we have found to be helpful if you would like to learn more.

Web MD and the Cleft Palate Foundation have a lot of helpful information on clefts, what they are and how they are treated.

This is a great blog post from a family that adopted a daughter from China with cleft lip and cleft palate. She explains things much better than I could!

One last piece of info, we learned today that our I800 (immigration paperwork) was approved! Yay!! On to the next step, which is getting our visas. We are still on track to have travel approval in March/early April and travel at the end of April.

 Thanks for reading this long and wordy post!  Happy Valentine's day everyone!