Always bouncing. Loving solids.

S has her second surgery on Tuesday. It will be her fourth procedure under anesthesia.

It is not as invasive and will not take as long as the first surgery. This one is all about repairing the left side. The doctor is confident that they won't need skull bone. They're basically just sewing up the opening, building up the lower part of her eye socket, and putting all the tissue where it needs to be. They are also taking out the distractor. I had hoped that they would be repairing her upper eyelid, but that will have to wait for another day.

She will look completely different. No more facial cleft. She'll have a more or less symmetrical face. Her left eye will still be half the size of her right and be covered in scar tissue, but that lower part of the eye will be pushed up to a more adequate level.

It's hard to write about this neutrally. As a parent of a child with craniofacial abnormalities, you try so hard to avoid words like "good" and "normal" and "correct." They lose their meaning. The face she was born with was perfect looking and normal to her and us. But it was missing a lot of parts. Parts necessary for eating or speaking. Parts that allow most other people to blend in, cheekbones and eyelids.

I spend a lot of time looking at her. We'll be lounging on the bed and she'll be snuggling/eating her favorite doll, and I'll take my glasses off so I can get right up next to her face, so I can really see every detail, every pore, like I'm some sort of makeup mirror with a memory. I take a gajillion pictures of her every day. I don't even post most of them. They're just for me to scroll through during a lull. Remember, remember. Remember her face right now. Her true face. But is it? She will never know this face. She only had it for seven months. She'll always deal with the aftermath of her clefts, the speech and eating issues. the scars, but the face she knows will be normal to her. And, it's not as if her face is even the totality of her personhood. She's an excitable, social goofball no matter what she looks like. I don't know. I don't really have the language to articulate the feels. I just love that dang cleft.