N is for Noa!

Just a quick post - Noa at the baby shower for her BBF (and long time sitter) Melissa, creating a page for her soon-to-be-here baby's book. Everyone got a letter of the alphabet to decorate, and as you can see Noa (which some help from another BBF and long time sitter, Jes) totally got in on the action. If the surroundings look familiar it's because the shower was at our place (hosted by Melissa's tireless Mom and sisters). It worked out great for us - Noa could be at the party and have all her toys!

In other big news, we're sheduled to go up to Boston at the end of the month so that Noa can be evaluated at the Perkins School for the Blind. As some of you may recall, Ben and I visited the school about a year and a half ago. It's an amazing place - the gold stand really (and Helen Keller's alma mater). The evaluation isn't necessarily about placing Noa there - it's really about getting an evaluation of Noa that actually reflects her capabilities. Evaluating blind kids is extremely difficult and even most tools used to evaluate disabled kids don't apply. For example: "Can the child copy a picture of a circle?" is a question that appears on most evals. Also: "Can the identify and point to an object when asked, like a fire truck?" In spite of the fact that these are absurd questions for Noa, they count against her in trying to figure out her cognitive skills and/or potential because even if they don't directly count against her (sometimes those questions are just disregarded), there are no blind-equivilant questions that could be counted in her favor. So, this is a big deal for us. We put our name on the wait list for this more than a year ago and only came up this quickly when a slot happened to open.