Progress (sort of)

She slept through the night last night (mostly) after a very, very long and loud tantrum which was triggered by an eyelash that she couldn't rub out of her eye. It was the worst meltdown so far; there are not even words to describe her anger, distress, and frustration. At the end, I finally had to leave her room because she was obviously made more angry by my presence and I was honestly afraid that she would hurt herself she was flailing so wildly. I walked out of the room for about 2 minutes and then went back in, at which point she reached up to be held and stopped screaming. Just like that. Then, she laid down on the bed and patted the pillow next to her, for me to lie down too. I asked her "do you want me to hold you" (I know, I know. What the hell was I thinking?) and she shook her head and whimpered a little, then patted the pillow again, like "this is as much as I can do right now. Take it or leave it, mom."

I figured out that at night she gets upset because she gets "stuck" in a corner of her crib and then can't move her arms enough to get herself out. This wakes her up and she loses it for about 10 minutes before falling back asleep. Last night, I slept on the floor of her room while she slept on the queen size futon (also on the floor with no frame, so it's safe for her). This enabled her to roll around to her heart's content without getting trapped and she slept relatively well, aside from some whimpering (heartbreaking whimpering that literally brought tears to my eyes).

Ten more days. I can do this. I want to thank everyone for dropping off food to us (and the orange mead...yum). It's so, so nice to eat good food--we have been eating from the "Chinese" food bar at Haggen...Bleck.

Here are some post-surgery pictures of Nora. You can't really tell in these pictures, because her mouth is still pretty bloody, but her upper lip looks just perfect! It's positively kissable, sutures and all. It looks to me, now that the swelling has gone down, that her nose is going to be a little uneven and "upturned" for a while (the surgeon actually used the term "pig nose"). That will take some getting used to, but we can have it corrected (if we want to) just before Nora starts school. You can see that she is pretty black and blue on the left side of her face, all the way up to her eye. She literally had a face lift on that side; they had to go way up under her cheek to lift up the left side of her nose. That is pretty typical of cleft lip repairs as the whole floor of the nose was pulled down by the cleft. You can also see the stents in her nostrils. They are held in place by a few stitches and she needs those to keep scar tissue in her nose from closing up her nostril. The resident told us that stenotic nostrils are the hardest thing to repair in plastic surgery.

Wednesday afternoon at the hospital, just before discharge:


Friday morning: