Adoption

I can’t believe that we are already a week into July.  My sweet baby Grace is now three months old. It’s gone by in the blink of an eye (a sleepless eye, but an eye just the same). She is a true joy, such a sweet and laid back baby, and I still can’t believe how lucky we are to have her. When you start the adoption journey you never know where it will take you, how long it will take or what the outcome will be. We were blessed beyond belief. Not only did our journey take less than a year, but we truly have the best birth parents that you could ever dream of. There are days where I ask myself how on earth did this happen? I guess some things are meant to be, and this was one of them.

We had a wonderful July 4th up in the cool mountains of Pinetop, along with lots of family. It’s an annual tradition, we’ve been going up for the past eight years, and each year there are more and more of us. Not everyone makes it every year, but most years there are probably at least 20 of us. Good times, lots of fun, food and laughter and of course always a little drama (hey – it’s family!).

Enjoying the 4th of July Parade in Pinetop

Dancing with her cousins at Charlie Clarks

Fishing for the first time

Bella caught her first fish!

Annual family boat race

The beds in the loft that Bella and I slept in - under the stars

Grandma and Grace

Playing Blockus

One last game of horseshoes

Next week will bring the day I have been dreading for almost two years – my daughter Bella’s pharyngeal flap surgery to repair her velopharyngeal inadequacy. It’s a surgery we’ve known she’s needed, but I’ve put off. It’s been on the books more than once, and I’ve canceled. It’s just SO hard to send your child into surgery. She could live her life without this procedure, but her speech is very difficult to understand, and this will hopefully greatly improve it. She’s done two years of speech therapy, and we’ve sought out the best in Arizona (at Barrow Neurological Institute), and they all agree that no amount of therapy can compensate for the physical limitations she has.

Everyone I’ve contacted who has had a child go through this, has been happy that they have done it, and noticed a huge change in their child’s speech. Up until about a year ago, when people couldn’t understand her, she assumed it was a problem with their hearing. Now, she is starting to realize that it is her speech that is the issue, and SHE wants the surgery. She gets frustrated with having to repeat herself, or having people not understand her at all. We’ve been very lucky that she’s not been teased (much) about it, but we know that time is not far off unless we take this path.

I’ve tried to not think about it too much, but it’s upon us, and I have to be prepared. We will spend at least one night in the hospital, and upon coming home she will be on a liquid diet for ten days, followed by a soft diet for another ten. She will not be able to dance or swim (two activities that take up the majority of her time in the summer) so we are facing a lot of “down time”. I’ve arranged for a number of the older girls at her dance studio to come over and hang out with her to help break up the days. While I am sure I will do a lot of reading, crafts, game playing and movie watching with her, I know she will get a bit bored (okay a lot bored as she’s an extremely active child with a very busy schedule). I hope having a variety of friends to also do those things with will help. It will also help me with Grace, and getting some work done.

Once she starts her soft diet, we will take a tour of all the new frozen yogurt places popping up in Phoenix and Scottsdale. My other ideas are pottery painting, Build A Bear, the movie theater and maybe a few trips to the Arizona Science Center. I’m still looking for ideas – it’s hard to get through the AZ summer without swimming, but we will make it work.

So for now I just try to not give into anxiety attacks and desire to just cancel the surgery, and know that we have one of the best craniofacial surgeons in the state, are at the best hospital and that this will help her tremendously. I know it’s not a life or death surgery, and in the scale of things it’s tiny and we are blessed to have nothing bigger to handle, but it’s still the hardest thing in the world for me. Deep breaths, distraction and keeping myself busy with my gorgeous girls, work and getting everything ready for recovery is the plan for now.