The primary reason I started this blog is to help me process my feelings about and experiences with my baby boy Charlie. Charlie was born with a birth defect called hemifacial microsomia. The right side of his face is smaller than the left. His facial nerve on that side is somewhat paralyzed, so his smile, and more noticeably, his crying face, are crooked. He has trouble closing that eye, so it can get dried out. His right ear is malformed; it looks very much like a shiitake mushroom. He has moderate hearing loss in that ear that can be corrected later. All of these issues, except for the nerve, can be helped with surgery when he is bigger. He is very healthy and developmentally spectacular, especially considering he came five weeks early. He’s five months old today and has a chuckle that kills.
I would like to tell the story of his dramatic entrance into the world (though not as dramatic as my friend Jessica’s baby Jacob, who was born on the side of the road on the way to the hospital). I’d like to chronicle our adventures. This will require many postings, because there’s a lot to say and because I really should be using this time while Summer is in school and Charlie is sleeping to scrape the meat grease out of the pan from last night’s taco extravaganza.
Every day in the newspaper there’s something horrible that makes me feel like the luckiest woman on Earth to have two gorgeous healthy children. Today, I read about a one-year-old girl who died because someone accidentally left her strapped into her car seat in a closed car for seven hours. Sometimes, though, I look at Charlie and my gut contracts because the right side of his face looks caved in and I just wish he looked like a regular kid. I obsess about it for a while, and then remember, say, my mom’s neighbor at the shore, who has a child with cerebral palsy, and I remember how lucky I am. Repeat cycle. Repeat cycle. Repeat cycle.
Another big reason I started this blog is that I revere Heather Armstrong’s.
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