Chun Le turns 3!!!

Our littlest daughter had her birthday about a week ago...Chun Le turned three years old on January 13th! What a special day to celebrate this past year of tremendous growth in soooooo many ways for her. We had a family birthday party on Saturday the 12th that she thoroughly enjoyed being the center of attention at. Here are some photos from that time:

As seen in the pictures above, one of the gifts Chun Le got was a special Asian doll dressed in a Chinese outfit that was handmade by Grandma Stowers. Chun Le loves her new doll! When we went to JC Penney for her three year old photos a couple days later we had her wearing her Chinese outfit (bought in China) and pose with the doll for several of the pictures. She enjoyed doing that. The next day, Sunday, Jan 13 was Chun Le's actual birthday. After church, our family went out to lunch at All Aboard Diner. It is a fun restaurant that features lots of trains. We got to sit around a counter that has a train track. The train delivers your food and also delivered the birthday girl a special scoop of ice cream with a candle on it while "Happy Birthday" was playing and being sung by the servers. It was fun for all the kids and Chun Le enjoyed her special ice cream train delivery a lot.

One other fun thing to mention that Chun Le has started now that she is three...her first gymnastics class! She has been watching Isaac attend gymnastics each week at the park district since the fall and has been so anxious to get in a class of her own. She has gone to two classes so far and really, really likes it and is doing well. We were not sure how she would do with communication with the teacher and other students since her words are often not very intelligible yet, but she finds ways to communicate what must be spoken. :) It is neat to see that in a new group of kids her own age she is fitting in just fine despite her speech delays. Here is a photo we took just before she headed into her first gymnastics class.

One last thing we want to share is the good news we got at the appointment today with Dr. Daw (her plastic surgeon). We had not seen him since August and at that time she had the small fistula after her palate repair surgery. When he examined her today, he confirmed that indeed it is gone...or at least so small and not completely through the palate so there is no need for a second palate repair surgery this summer!!!! We thank God for answered prayer about this. Dr. Daw gave us a referral to visit the speech patholgist on the cleft team at Hope Children's Hospital. We were at the cleft clinic there a year ago when we first came home but have not been back since. He wants us to just touch base with the speech pathologist and hopefully that will give us some information that we can pass along to the new speech patholgist that Chun Le is working with since last week at the school district for her speech therapy (she has never worked with a cleft kid before). Dr. Daw said that he typically gives 12 -18 months or so after palate repair to watch how speech progresses before making the decision about whether or not Chun Le will need a p-flap surgery. So we have probably at least an 18 month stretch before any new cleft surgeries...yeah!!!!