Saturday night sippy cup

Little One is healing up amazingly well. Crazy well. As in…it looks like she’s always had a closed palate (closed roof in her mouth). It is incredible the difference. The way her surgeon closed the cleft in her lip blew my mind. The palate – even more incredible. I’ve gotten a lot of questions asking about what exactly happened for the palate repair. I’m not going to post pictures, but I will try to explain it through a rough sketch and words.

Her palate was open from the gumline to the back of her throat. So, if you looked into her mouth the ‘roof’ of her mouth was open up into her nasal cavity. As you can imagine that makes for all kinds of difficulties with speech, eating, drinking, sucking, etc. To close her palate the doctor went along the inside of her gum line and cut the palate off both sides. He then brought the two sides together and stitched it down the middle. The cleft also split her uvula in half, so her uvula was stitched together too. The area between the gumline and the combined palate (where he cut) was left open. Within two weeks new flesh grew to fill in those gaps. Crazy! The way God made our bodies to heal is so incredible. So two weeks ago, she had all kinds of stitches and gaps of open flesh in her mouth…and a stitched together uvula. If you looked in her mouth today, you would have no idea of any of that.

Imagine you are looking at the roof of Little One’s mouth in these…use your imagination here!

Crazy, huh?!

She still isn’t sleeping much, but in every other way seems pretty much healed. Such a little warrior. She’s been teasing us a little like she is going to drink out of a sippy cup instead of her bottle. I’ll take the teasing because a little bit has actually made it in her mouth. And she is just really cute when she does it.

FireCracker is just a little affectionate with her cousin. Just a little.

My other niece is…..awesome.

When she’s not teasing us with sippy cups, she likes to wear her brothers’ shirts like this. She reminds me of an Ewok and a Teletubbie, but much cuter of course. If you pull the shirt down she gets mad. She wants it just like this…

And there is your random surgery, cousin mauling and Ewok post to get your week going! Our internet has been down for a week and SnapShop registration opens in 10 minutes. I am a nervous wreck in the back booth at Panera! I hope you have a great Monday!!