Holiday Memories

As usual, I'll start out this blog post with an apology for the dearth of posts lately. Mortimer has been extremely busy. He keeps telling me that he'll put up a post, but he just hasn't had time. Christmas has been a time of reflections for us. For the last several months, we've found ourselves reflecting on "what things were like at this time last year" and thinking about how much has changed and how far Timmy has come in just a year. Holidays last year were hard. Anyone who has spent holidays sitting in a hospital room knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Last Thanksgiving we were only about ten days past Timmy's big emergency surgery, the day we came closest to losing him. We weren't really sure how to celebrate. We thought about dressing Timmy up like a turkey, but we never had time to make it to the store to buy feathers. So we settled for turkey socks. There were no restrictions on NICU visitors, so we had a quick family Thanksgiving dinner at home, and then family members took turns visiting Timmy at his bedside.

As hard as Thanksgiving was, Christmas was much harder. A week before Christmas we made the decision to transfer Timmy to Cincinnati, since the doctors in Columbus

didn't know what to do with him. A few days before Christmas, the Cincinnati docs did a scope and declared his airway to be critical. That meant that we were no longer allowed to pick him up or hold him. We'd been through long periods of time before when we couldn't pick him up, but always before he was either extremely sedated (or paralyzed) or he was too little to know the difference (or both). This time around it was rough, because he was just old enough to know that he should have been held. Visitors were also extremely restricted, so even though we had family come to Cincinnati for Christmas, most of them weren't allowed to see Timmy. But Timmy was a trooper, and he pulled through, cute as ever!

A few days after Christmas was Timmy's big surgery. His airway was critical enough that they booked his surgery for the first available slot in the OR after Christmas, and his surgeon gave up a day of his vacation to come in and do the surgery. (We will be forever grateful.) We were

extremely nervous--we'd already been through one failed airway surgery.

We spent a long day sitting in the surgery waiting room, waiting for news. But in the end, everything went beautifully. No complications. And today, a year and a day later, everything continues to look great!

This year, everything has been completely different. On Thanksgiving, all of our family came to us, and we spent the weekend giving thanks for Timmy's good health, eating food, playing games, and spending much needed time with our family. Timmy even got his first taste of pumpkin pie!

Around the same time, Timmy once again defied expectations. Even though we'd been told in October that crawling was far, far away and that there was no way he'd be crawling by Thanksgiving, a week before Thanksgiving Timmy decided he was ready to be mobile.

(And for those of you who are wondering, we have, sort of, solved the feeding tube problem. If we put the IV pole on its lowest setting, and if there are no toys in the way, Timmy can pull around his pole!)

Christmas has also been wonderful. Looking back to where we were a year ago, we're so lucky that Timmy is doing so well and is, in many respects, a perfectly normal one-year old who loves making messes, getting into things he shouldn't, and refusing to take naps.

Timmy had lots of fun at church on Christmas morning. (I'm afraid some people may not have been paying attention to his grandpa...)
















Timmy was dealing with the beginnings of a cold on Christmas Day, and the next day he was pretty sick. We were about five minutes from heading in to the ER when things turned around, and we have officially weathered a cold with no hospital stay! (Thankfully this seems to be a virus with few respiratory symptoms.)

It's amazing how far he's come in just a year. We can't wait to see what sort of mischief he's getting into next Christmas. Merry Christmas everyone!




(And Mortimer's New Year's resolution is to keep up with the blog, so hopefully you'll be hearing from him soon.)