Dear family and friends,

June was the month of adventures. At the beginning of the month we went up to Canada for my niece's wedding. It took us three days to travel up, and Antonia traveled incredibly well. It was a great time to be with family and to change Antonia's context--she always enjoys being with those she loves.

On the way back home, a week later, it was just Antonia and myself (the children stayed with Grandma and Grandpa in Canada). I was a little nervous seeing that I wouldn't be able to attend to her very well when I was driving, but God is good, and she traveled home as good, if not better, than on the way up.

Once we arrived home we had a day to get repacked and then traveled down to Wallowa County, Oregon for Zac and Catlin Hostetter's wedding. Once again Antonia traveled marvelously and our time was delightful.

It has been so good to see her mood begin to stabilize more and more over time. We don't always realize how good it is until she has a bad day and it reminds us of how bad it was before.

Since our last post we have been researching and looking into stem cell transplants. What we have been discovering has been quite fascinating. God has given us stem cells, which we produce in our own bodies, to rebuild the cells in our bodies--this is why healing takes place. What can happen in Antonia's case is that both the actual cell repair, and the encouraging of new cell growth, can take place in the brain. This certainly is not a guaranteed fix, or some "miracle" procedure, but there is repairing that takes place and often some good results follow the procedure.

What the doctors will do is take some of her own stem cells from her bone marrow, and some umbilical stem cells (not embryonic) from a stem cell bank, and then inject them into the brain through a catheter. When this happens the newly introduced stem cells will go where they can to begin repairing damage. (The way I am describing this is somewhat simplistic, and makes it sound like the brain will be fixed, but the scale of the procedure is so microscopic and the repairs so minute that the improvements can be anywhere from barely seen to fairly dramatic.) If it works well, we will continue to pursue this kind of treatment.

As you might expect, we need your prayers both for wisdom, on our part and the doctors, and for the procedure itself. It is not a high risk procedure, but we would most certainly covet your prayers that it would be affective, and that God would provide for us financially in order to pursue treatments of this kind.

We do praise our God, because, for reasons that only belong to him, we have been blessed with open doors and insight into some amazing treatments that are going on in the world, plus he has placed us in a period of time when there has been some significant ground gained medically in helping cases like Antonia's.

We praise our God for you all and thank you for your prayers.

Grace and Peace to you,

Dean