Learning to Be a Baby

A good friend messaged me earlier this week because she had been looking at all the photos of Matthew on our blog and on Facebook and she had noticed that there weren’t any pictures of Matthew smiling. She remembered several photos of him before his lip repair with a HUGE grin on his face, and she wondered if his temperament had been affected by the surgery.

I wrote her back, telling her about last night’s dinner hour when Matthew was giggling and hamming it up for the other four of us for most of the time we were eating. It was an honest question, though. I realized I haven’t taken a lot of photos where he’s smiling. For a few weeks after the lip repair, his lips were sewn so tightly together that he couldn’t smile very well. But now that everything’s relaxed, he’s back to his big, wide-mouthed smile.

I’m sorry I’m terribly behind in keeping up this blog. There are so many things I’d like to report, but life is busy and I’m struggling some days just to keep up with the living of it. There’s very little time for virtual living right now.

I will share that Matthew continues to attach to our family, and I’m literally watching him become the baby that he never had the chance to be in the orphanage. I can tell he’s getting comfortable being part of our family. It’s in the little things—like the way he literally molds himself into my body while eating a bottle, kicks his legs, makes little sighs, and snuggles close to me. It’s in the way he puts his head on my shoulder at night while I’m singing him goodnight, how he runs giggling into my arms when I sit on the floor to play with him.

A baby in an orphanage really isn’t a baby at all—he’s a little person who learns to console himself when his needs aren’t met—he learns that grown ups don’t always take care of you, that sometimes you have to take care of yourself. But here, in our house, Matthew is learning that there is always enough food, that when he falls down and cries, someone comes and picks him up. He learns that he can be a baby and trust the grown ups to take care of him. He’s literally moving backwards, becoming a baby, and it’s so lovely to see.

He’s also moving forward, though. He’s signing “all done” when he’s done eating. He’s doing a great job eating food at the table (although his table diet consists mostly of Tillamook vanilla yogurt) and he has taken to the spoon and easily swallows food (instead of spitting it out, as he used to do). Instead of just lying on the floor picking up toys and dropping them, he’s actually making “vroom-vroom” noises with cards, giving kisses to stuffed animals, filling containers and dumping them out again—all types of play that are more developmentally appropriate to his age.

It’s kind of miraculous to watch.

We’ve had our fall surgeries scheduled too, which makes my stomach hurt when I think about them too much (mostly because I hate that Matthew has to live through more pain). He will have dental surgery on October 30, and his palate repair is scheduled for November 27 (the day before his 2^nd birthday, boo-hoo!).

But as Aaron and I keep telling ourselves, by December 1, all his major surgeries will be over for quite some time. And the next time Matthew goes into the operating room, we’ll be able to talk with him and explain what’s happening, and he can tell us when things hurt so we can do a better job managing his pain.

Here are some new photos of our boy—I can’t believe how he’s growing and changing. And Aimee, some of these are especially for you—the smiling ones! Plus a little video of my giggling boy.