say cheese!

This was a day I would not want to repeat.  Now that it’s over, I’m glad we did it, but it was a really tough morning.

It started out great.  Look how excited she was!

And she loved putting on her gown, specials socks, and “clown hat.”

Even though a few people warned me that it would be difficult to watch my daughter slip out of consciousness, I still was not prepared for it.  She jerked around and tensed up her face and clutched my hand even harder as she slipped into never neverland.  I left the room crying and wondering, “What have I done?”

Watching her wake up was even more painful.  She was borderline hysterical and nothing we tried would console her.  She didn’t know where she was, she was in pain, and she was freezing.  She kept yelling, “I want to go home!  I want to go back to the Dubs!”  Again I asked myself, “What have I done?”  It took about 30 minutes to calm her down.  I held her in my lap, wrapped in layers and layers of heated blankets.  I asked her if she’d like to take a nap with me later that afternoon and she said, “How about right now?” and then promptly fell asleep in my lap.

When she was coherent enough, we left the surgery center with a popsicle in hand.  She licked the stick clean, even though after the first bite, she exclaimed, “This tastes disgusting!”  (Might have had something to do with the fact that her lip was still oozing. . .)

We came back to our friends’ house (the infamous Dubs) who have been so gracious to take care of us while we’re here in town.  She rested, carefully drank a smoothie, and watched The Princess and the Frog.

She was pretty clingy to me the entire day, but became more and more herself as the day wore on.  By the time we were getting ready for bed, she was laughing at how funny her lip looks when she says words with B’s or P’s in them because her upper lip is still very swollen (and will be for the next couple days).  She couldn’t stop giggling as she said “big blue bumblebee bug” in the mirror.

And here is what my beautiful girl looks like now:

I can’t believe what a drastic change it is already, and the surgeon said it will be a couple weeks before it really “settles down all the way.”  You can see the edge of the stitches (which apparently looks like a dead bug) and the swelling in her top lip.  She’s still a little loopy in this picture, but isn’t she gorgeous??

So, what HAVE I done?  After watching Berkeley look at herself in the mirror for the first time post-surgery and get the biggest grin on her face, I don’t have to wonder anymore.