A surprise engagement

Tonight we all went to Chuy's for dinner because James, Valerie's boyfriend, wanted to ask everyone in the family for their blessing before he proposed to Valerie. Well, Gayla brought the ring to the restaurant for everyone to see, so instead of this just being Valerie's birthday dinner, it also became an engagement! James was going to save the proposal one or two more days or perhaps even in Costa Rica, but with the entire family at dinner, he thought he would just go for it. So we conspired with the waitstaff to put the ring in her birthday cake and there it went. Congrats to Valerie and James!! We all wanted to help them celebrate, so grandma and paw paw ended up with all the girls (which by the way, Maya had so much fun that she didn't even want to say buy to me!)

Other stuff going on...Maya finished her aquatic therapy at Tx Children's last Tuesday and we will be starting it at Gayla's house next week with her other therapist. We are very excited that we can continue aquatic as we keep hearing how great it is for these kiddos. She had her final assessment for the aquatic at Tx Children's and we tried all sorts of different support devices for Maya's chest/back. We tried a spio, the theratogs and even kinesiotape (which was ridiculous to get off of her back - my poor girl). I'm still not sure what we will go with. We had submitted an application to the Scottish Rite hospital in Dallas (as a referral from a friend of a friend in Corsicana) and found out that Maya was not a candidate for the program. I guess its actually a good thing that Maya doesn't need any orthopedic treatments at this time though. I did note that there are doctors in Dallas that could help Maya out on the orthopedic mgmt front, so we will keep those numbers handy. We got word that Maya's stander was approved and we should have it by the end of the month. Can't wait! We are headed to the Families of Spinal Muscular Atrophy Conference this Thursday in Cincinnati and are very excited.