What a difference a year makes!

One year ago today, my sweet little baby was not quite 7 months old. At 6 in the morning, Rob and I and handed off our precious little one to a very nice anesthesiologist with an English accent at the Mott's Children's Hospital of U-M. We spent the rest of the day anxiously waiting for reports from a pediatric neurosurgeon and plastic surgeon. By 5:00 that evening, our son was in the surgical recovery room receiving a pint of blood and IV morphine. He looked like this and I didn't recognize him at first:


A week later, we all came home from the hospital. The swelling gradually went down, the stitches dissolved, the hair grew back... and we recovered. It probably took this entire year for me to feel OK again. I still get a real sick feeling whenever he bonks his head on something, so maybe I'm not fully recovered. Still, I know that the experience of having a major surgery (a craniectomy - skull reconstruction - to repair a fused sagittal suture, a condition called craniosynostosis) on my babe traumatized me while simultaneously proving my good fortune. That his condition could be treated, that we had access to the best specialists in the world, that we had insurance to pay for much of it, that we all walked out of there with little more than a few months of night terrors... I cannot believe how lucky we are. And how awful that was to go through. And how much I love my kiddos.

My biggest complaint today is that I don't have enough time to knit. I've got nothing to complain about and so much more than so many others in this country and the world. I think I better go knit some hats for some preemies!

Here's what Jackson looks like today, with his older brother:


Someone please smack me the next time I bitch about how hard it is to take care of these two beautiful human beings who love me more than the air they breathe.