I wanted everyone to see this image of Leaf with his nice steady eyes.  In Leaf's pre-China photos, his eyes are off to one side, closed, or crooked.  Here, though he's not looking straight into the camera, you can see how much more steady they are.  New little hints of better vision have been revealing themselves still.  

One of the nurses held up a large bright Christmas bow about 10 or 12 inches from his face.  He saw it immediately and rubbed his eyes like he was trying to wipe the red away - I think it was so bright that he didn't understand what it was doing there.  He would look away for a second and again try to see what was in front of him, but that big red object was still there!  So he rubbed his eyes again not completely sure why he was seeing all that saturate color.  This continued for a few minutes until the nurse put the bow down.  

Leaf usually doesn't turn his head to look because he doesn't see around him.  He will usually only look to the side because we ask him to; with a lot of therapy and coaxing we work to get him to "look with his eyes".  We've been noticing now that he's experiencing more spontaneous head movement.  A doctor will walk in with a bright white coat on and Leaf's eyes and head move to look at the coat while she approaches.  He's not quite sure why his head and eyes are doing this, so he fights it a little and tries to go back to looking into nothingness.  He can't help it though, and his head jerks back to the white coat for a few more seconds.  In the same way he's starting to be more aware of people's faces and will turn to look at them when they move in close.  

As a rudimentary vision test, I've been checking Leaf's pupils every day or every other day.  At first his nystagmus was looking better but his pupils remained open when I shined the pen light on them.   At home, if we set Leaf in a sunny window, it will take about three minutes for his pupils to change to the appropriate size.  Now it seems, that even though they don't react as fast as someone with normal vision, the time it takes for them to move from big open pupils to tiny tight pupils is reducing.  Our last two counts were 15 seconds, 2 days later, 10 seconds - much better time than three minutes.  I've read of children going home with normal pupil response.  I still have hope that the next two sessions of stem cells will bring him even closer to this possibility.

Leaf has a bad cold right now -  unfortunately that means we can't get injections 5 and 6 until he is feeling well.  We are working hard to get him healthy so he can have more cells.  I think he'll come home with a few nice improvements, but we expect even more over the next few months as all of the cells grow and develop.  Many children end up with more blood vessels around the optic nerve - as well, the atrophied nerves becomes more pink.  We'll continue to keep tabs on his endocrine system too.  

Much love and thanks, Stephanie and Johnny