Good morning! Boy, this has been one busy new year here for us! As I mentioned in the post about our upcoming goals, we are trying to do a lot during the next several months. We need to get the church much better organized, we are re-structuring the cell groups, and just working hard at getting every single person involved in the reaching out to others in our city. With those lofty goals, also comes a whole lot of preparation, and that’s what I’ve been working on for several weeks now. I haven’t had a real rest since January 4th, so I’m getting tired. The worst part of what we do down here is that we don’t have a 9 to 5 job, my work usually starts about 8:00 am, and usually ends at about 10:00 pm or later. I try to take a few evenings off, but these past two weeks I haven’t had the chance to even do that!

I know many of you have been praying for Norah. She has been much better of the past weeks, seeming to be a lot stronger. But last week she had another regression. On Tuesday she lost almost all of her strength, and almost passed out. She couldn’t function for quite awhile, and was very out of it. We got some new bloodwork done on her, and we got the results on Friday. We were a little worried that she had some problems with her blood sugar, but that all seemed to be fine. Her red blood-cells were still low, although a little higher than last time. She was just over the anemic boundaries with that. Her white blood-cells are still very low, much lower than the normal. For those of you who know about any of this, her white blood-cells are a 4,400 / mm3 and they should be between 5,000 – 10,000/mm3. That really isn’t our biggest worry, because her defenses have always been pretty low. What we did check this time was this… The amount of iron in her blood. That was something that wasn’t checked last time, and that is what seems to be the problem. She has 55.0 ug/dL when it should be from 60 -150 ug/dL. So… we think we know what the problem has been. She has Iron Deficiency Anemia. She has a pretty low number of red blood cells, and in those red blood cells, she has very little Iron. If you’re interested you can read about it on this wikipedia page… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_deficiency_anemia. Anyway, she is taking some iron pills and in about 3 weeks or so, we are going to get another blood test done to see how things have improved.

I’m not much of a believer in putting kids in school too early, but we have decided to put Jordan into preschool this year. As many of you know, he doesn’t talk very well yet, although he understands both English and Spanish very well. (I would say perfectly, but he’s still a kid… and no one understands “perfectly” ) We feel that one of his big problems is that he is just plain lazy in talking. He can make known what he wants just pointing or pulling, or doing it himself. Another thing is that Erynn always translates for him. We’ve been trying to MAKE him say things, but he won’t do it often. We had him checked in the states, and although he still needs lots of tests, he seems to not have any major problems, other than he is behind in his speaking development. We decided to put him into a preschool here in Sucre, and hope that he will be forced to communicate there, and with so many other kids around him, he’ll learn to talk better. We Hope!!! He’ll be going there from Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm.

The school is very well regarded here in Sucre as one of the best pre-schools and kindergartens. It is owned and run by Germans. The only problem with that is that our School expenses keep going up every little bit! Now, we’ll be paying close to $2000 a year just on school fees. Oh well, it’s worth it for our kids to get a good education. I’ll keep you updated on his progress as he goes on.

Jason