A little piece of heaven

Nathan went to see his great grandma and family on Owen’s side. He had a good time, he got to play with all his cousins and to run around in just his diapers (it was hot).

Today we took Nathan to the LA Zoo for the first time and he loved it!

Of course he was more interested in people watching than in checking out the animals. But it was perfect for him as he loves to people watch and there was just so much eye candy.

We went with this friend Presley and her mom Michal and it was lots of fun. We discovered a way for Nathan to enjoy his stroller, and Michal discovered she can have Presley facing out in the baby Bjorn, so it was a day full of revelations.

We all had a great time and we ended the day with dinner at the Souplantation and a quick walk through the mall.

Check out the photos here: LA Zoo

On Thursday we took Nathan to see the opthalmologist and it went well. She thinks he has good vision. However, she’s giving him a diagnosis of cortical visual impairment as it’s difficult to tell how his brain is processing the information.

Afterwards we had our appointment with Dr. McCombe, the neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital LA. We were interested in a second opinion and wanted to explore Children’s Hospital. He said the shunt is working fine and at this time there’s nothing that needs to be done.

We decided not to switch to Children’s as there were a couple of things that we weren’t happy about with Dr. McCombe. He emphasized that the best thing about all this is that Nathan’s mutation is spontaneous, not inherited, so we can have lots of normal children. It felt like he was discarding Nathan’s life due to his problems and we left feeling flattened.

Dr. Lazaref, Nathan’s neurosurgeon at UCLA, has told us many times that he thinks Nathan is going to do very well and he gives us hope.

So we are going to stick with Dr. Lazaref in the future for any neurosurgical issues.

Other than that, things are very good and stable. We are going to enroll Nathan in a study at the NIH so they can study his genetic mutation and hopefully learn more about it so they can help other children in the future.

Again thanks for checking in and for your continued support and prayers