Recovering

Before this surgery, a friend of mine said she hoped the recovery this time would be better than we expect. I heard her, and thought to myself, "Ya, right. We have been through this before. We know how it goes."

But I guess we never went through a lip repair-only surgery yet.

          It has been a little better. Just goes to show you where me and my bad attitude got me.

It is still really hard to see your kid in so much pain. It has to be unbelievably hard to be the kid. Sammy's whole face swelled up so he couldn't smile (not that he would want to yet) and could hardly open his mouth. He is on a soft diet which is really nice because we can feed him regular food and he can actually get filled up.

             Liquid diets suck, my friends...

So since he can't open his mouth much, we give him his liquids (drinks, soups, smoothies) with a syringe. It hurts to open wide enough even to take a regular cup. We use a tiny baby spoon to feed him soft foods like yogurt and mashed potatoes and mac 'n cheese. Any other spoons are too wide and it hurts him to open up that much. Sammy is our meat-eater ~ I swear the kid could eat meat all day long if we let him. Yesterday we cut up a hot dog and a piece of chicken in tiny little pieces about the size of peas and fed it to him. He was so happy!

So it has been a little better this time around, but we are still dealing with "stuff". Like being helicopter-parent worrying about anything bumping Sammy's face for fear the stitches will split. And if the stitches split, his face splits. Scary stuff. I feel like we are constantly barking at the boys, "Keep that away from Sam's face! Don't swing that around! Sammy get down from there! Be careful! Blahblahblahblah!" And then there is the "stuff" like the short people being super-needy and whiny and demanding. Sammy is understandably super-needy, but David has amped it up in the neediness arena already. We see so many up stretched arms and carry around kids who are 30 pounds, give or take a few... it feels like when we just got back from China all over again. At least my back feels that way :-D  It's that two-fer thing where you can't adequately meet both adopted kids' intense and pervasive needs at the same time. So we opt to tend to Sammy and sometimes David just has to wait a few minutes.

            David's time is a-comin' though. Oh, baby.

And I do think we realistically know what to expect with David's recovery. He will be in lots more pain than Sammy is in now. And it ain't gonna be fun, but it will be so exciting when David can speak even more clearly. We are excited to hear his "new" voice, because we know it will immediately sound so different.

I was praying this morning and I suddenly realized that it is important to keep our eyes on the finish line, and to keep things in perspective. Thank you, Lord. Our goal with the surgeries is to have our kids be able to speak clearly and to have as little visible cleft scars as possible. These cleft surgeries will cause them pain, but it is temporary. It will be beautiful in the long run.

Keeping our eyes on the prize at the finish line,
(((hugs))),
chris


Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good! His faithful love endures forever.
                            ~ Psalm 106:1