Since I wrote last, we’ve had our ups and downs with the sleeping. Just when we had decided that she was going through some behavioral sleep issues and I was ready to apply the “Dr. Spock method” (you just let the child cry themselves to sleep), she had another really bad night during which she woke up crying after about 3-4 hours of sleep. She was unconsolable and it seemed like she was in pain. It took here a long time to fall asleep. This was already about 10 days ago so I don’t remember if she (or we) got much sleep at all that night. The following day (Veteran’s day) I called Dr. Black, Ella’s neurosurgeon. Thankfully he called back, even though the hospital was officially closed. He thought it a possbility that the lack of drainage of the cerebral-spinal fluid due to her lying flat could actually cause head aches or discomfort. It seems to me strange that there would be an effect in such a short time, in a matter of hours. Anyhow, he suggested that we raise her head up during sleep by about 20%. If that didn’t help, we should bring her in for another CT scan. We have raised her up since then every night which has seemed to work. She had difficulty sleeping only one night since and that might have been due to a soiled diaper. I hope this won’t be an issue forever. We do have a CT scan in little over a month anyway. Other than that, Ella is making steady progress. There are little new things every week. For example, she has added pasta to her very limited repetoire of foods as a result of force feedings at school (they are used to this kind of thing). She also says new sounds, and sometimes words too. She’s not consistent with these though, but it is clear that she means what she is trying to say. I visited her in school today and was suprised by how thrilled she was to get a sticker at the end of the day (with an extra one for using the toilet at school!). She always comes home with a sticker and I figure she doesn’t really care but apparently that’s only b/c I never saw her getting the stick stuck on. I just didn’t get it!