April 2, 2009

Tomorrow's the big day. Leila has her surgery. Surgery is scheduled for 11:30. We have to be there at 9:30. That means leaving our house around 7 AM. She can't have anything to eat or drink after midnight tonight. She will NOT be happy tomorrow. She's used to eating breakfast first thing when she gets up.
Surgery should take until almost 2:00. And she's only supposed to be in the hospital for one night.

I decided today that I needed to take a picture of her mouth. There are people that do not even know exactly what a cleft palate is. (It's a hole in the roof of her mouth.) Most people have never seen a cleft palate. More importantly though - when she gets older, LEILA may want to see what her mouth looked like for 17 months. And after tomorrow, it won't look like that anymore.

I started out trying to do this by myself. Trying to hold her back, tickle her so she'd laugh, and take a picture all at the same time - isn't exceptionally easy. David finally came in, and I convinced him that this NEEDED to be done. He did agree to help, but he didn't have a lot of time to spend on this all important task. Next we tried holding a cheerio in front of her nose, so she'd open her mouth to snap the picture. (She probably felt like a dog with a biscuit balanced on his nose.) Biggest problem with that, is that my camera isn't instantaneous. There's a slight delay between pushing the button and it actually taking the picture. I got lots of pictures of her chin, her nose, her tongue, etc. Finally through the course of all this hoopla I got one that I considered passable. Maybe that's only because I know what I'm looking at though.