Foto Fabulous Friday

Heaven in Maine....

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(Foto quality disclaimer - slow internet speed necessitated lower quality upload.

I figured we will all live nonetheless.)

 

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(Belated) Foto Fabulous Friday

An early spring day.

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Brilliant Glimpses of an Ornery Toddler

If you plop Jacob somewhere, you can be sure he will be pretty much in the same spot until you move him again.

You may remember the saga of Jacob learning to sit unassisted. He is now a master at sitting unassisted but it requires a big person putting him in a sitting position first. Getting into sitting position? ...well.... that's another story. As is crawling (oh the horror), scooting, rolling or any other lateral movement. He has taken to being vertical but only when someone much bigger than him is holding both hands. So our toddler that doesn't toddle... or can't even sit up by himself, is limited in how much trouble he can get into.

All in his own time, we know.

One day recently, Grandma figured out how to turn Jacob's sitting up practice (we practice a lot) into a game by having him fall into a big fluffy pillow in the right position to then be able to push himself back up correctly only to fall into the pillow again. Over and over. Fun. We have been continuing that game with pillows, then a thickly folded blanket, then a thinly folded blanket.... Oh we are getting so close to pushing off the floor by ourself with this game! But still to date, never without big people around physically prompting or cheering.

Then this morning...

I left our stationary toddler laying down on the living room floor playing with a toy - a living room with an unsuspecting stack of catalogs neatly stacked on an ottoman (well out of reach of his horizontal spot on the floor) while I went down to the basement to deal with laundry.

I came back upstairs to this...

It is no exaggeration to say I almost cried.

Oh baby boy! Bring on the ornery toddler, we are so ready.

 

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Chatting it up....with me, myself and I

Jacob refused to make any noise for his speech therapist today. This is not unusual, unfortunately. He tends to torture her that way.

We're not sure why. She is wonderful and fun and he is enthralled with her when she is here. He watches everything she does intently, pays very close attention - and gives her big smiles and even hugs.... albeit mostly silently. It's really not fair. What she is doing with him is great and is helping him learn how to communicate and to make all kinds of noises. He just seems to save it all up and excercise it when she's not around... and often when no one else is either. I suppose one can't be faulted for chosing a practice audience carefully...

Caught in the act of chatting with the best audience one could find.... (himself!).

VIDEO LINK

 

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Our First Anniversary...

There is a lot written about the life altering experience of having a child. It's all true. The day Jacob was born certainly lived up to all of the lore. We, like all parents centuries before us, found ourselves tossed back and forth in the waves of... joy ...fear... excitement... worry... and in the middle of the emotionally raw juxtaposition of ...the fragility of life and the resilience of life ...the crisis of self identity and surety of self identity... the helplessness of lack of perspective and the clarity of new perspective... all at once. And, like the vast majority of first time parents centuries before us... at the end of the day we survived and were a beautiful family of three.

That was June 9, 2011. A red letter day, indeed.

Funny thing, though. If life had a tour guide, I smile at the thought that at that point we would have heard something like...."Fasten your seatbelt folks, we will begin the ride shortly."

Wait.... What?!?!

It's true. At the risk of minimizing the birth event of our first child. I am going to say it.... that was nothin'.

On May 7, 2012 we walked into a hospital with Jacob, our precious baby boy, after a long year of medical challenges and hospital stays.... and handed him to a surgeon knowing and signing papers agreeing... to put him to sleep... open his little baby chest... stop his little baby heart... fix it... start it back up again... and wake him back up.

(It's been a year and I still welled up when typing the words "stop his little baby heart". Eeesh. They stopped his little baby heart!)

Those hours will stand forever as the longest of our lives.... and that experience was transforming in a way that I don't know we will ever be able to adequately articulate. Partly because of the emotional trauma of the experience, sure. But mostly because of the flip side of that emotional trauma. That is... all of us, all of you included, were charging headlong into that trauma together with the faith, hope, dreams and prayers that it would -in fact- make our little boy better.

And it did.

Today we celebrate our first anniversary of *that* amazing day.

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A year ago we were here...

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Today we are here...

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And here...

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And here...

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There. Are. No. Words.

 

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