All clear!

Thank you to all of you who have sent messages and called about our plans and Tabitha’s progress. Tabitha is recovering extremely well from surgery and we’ve been given the all clear to go to Tanzania. The surgeon will see her again in a few years time, assuming we have no more problems in the mean time.

It’s been amazing to see Tabitha’s lip transform over the past couple of weeks. They are particularly pleased with the repair of the muscle. I had always noticed her lip sort of ‘hung down’, but I put it down to weakness or habit. Tabitha’s haemangioma appeared a few days after she was born. It grew rapidly and ulcerated very early on, causing her a great deal of pain and leaving her with scarring. She used a special feeder bottle as a baby, that didn’t require her to use her lips. I assumed she hung the lower lip down when feeding to avoid the pain of contact, and thought perhaps this habit had lasted.

Having now repaired the muscle, the surgeon was pleased to see her how her lip is moving normally when she speaks. There was no haemangioma there when Tabitha was born, and to me her lip now looks like it did when during those first few days before the problems started.

Simon is keeping himself busy with the house. It feels like the last opportunity to get everything up-to-date and there’s quite a bit to do. Thankfully no massive jobs, but enough small ones to keep him going for quite a while! We’re also home educating now. We haven’t really changed anything and I don’t plan on doing any official project work at the moment. I think project ‘moving overseas’ is enough for her to get her head around. We’re just trying to make sure we keep up with a bit of reading, writing and maths. Most of the syllabus stuff I’ve ordered is to start from next September, as I figured we’d take things fairly easy until then. I’ve just finished reading her Charlie and the chocolate factory, which she loved, I think that counts as work…?

We sent out a bag of stuff to Tanzania this week. It went out with a contact of Simon’s and it arrived in Mwanza the next day. We wont be in Mwanza until we’ve finished language training, so we had to plan ahead a bit, but exciting to know that our things are waiting for us!

We’re still not quite ready to book flights. We’ve received our work permits, but the next stage is our residents permits. We’re working out with those on the ground whether to wait for these to come through, or book without. Without them we’d need to book a return flight and waste the return component. With them we’d just need a single. Still lots of planning to do, but we’ll get there…