How has 8 months gone by already?

Yesterday I was playing with Cameron, and I looked at him and he looked at me, and I had a weird flashback to when I was pregnant with him. I kept thinking how it seemed to be taking forever to get Cameron here, and now he is already 8 months old. Where has the time gone? Now don't get me wrong, when he was a tiny baby and still in the hospital time seemed to be on hold. I couldn't wait until the next day because I wanted everything to be good and new again. I hated sitting in the hospital all day long while my baby laid in his little bed all helpless and most of the time recovering from surgery. Now I look at him with awe. Even though he is behind in his development, I constantly remind myself where he has come from.

Not all Apert children have such a rough start. In fact we thought for sure we would be one of those families because with the ultrasounds none of his internal stuff was detected. Which still baffles us. Anyway, because we were prepared we thought that we would have Cameron and that although he may have different needs, we thought that he would for the most part be very healthy. But unfortunately that wasn't the case. When he was born, aside from being 5 weeks early, his breathing needed to be aided by a ventilator. The next few days were a blur, but I remember all the tests coming back normal. Then when they tried to feed him and couldn't pass a feeding tube into his stomach, that is when things turned upside down. That is when they discovered the esophageal atresia, and that is also when they discovered his malrotation. Those two things have been repaired and he's had a shunt and the cranial surgery. Things to come are his hands, and feet, and at some point he needs to have a hernia repaired. And later on down the road, we will have to address his heart, because he has a minor thickening in one of his valves that we monitor, but that will one day need to have surgical repair in order to keep it from thickening too much.

So yesterday, when I was looking at my sweet 8 month old, while my head said where has the time gone, my heart said I want it to go faster so that we can have some of the bad parts over with and maybe have some time to just be a kid! Just being a baby is not something Cam has or ever will be familiar with, but my prayer is that we can get to a place where he can just be a kid!! I want so much for him, and yet struggle with not knowing whether or not he will do certain things. But for now, for this moment I'm going to be happy that I have a beautiful, funny, precious 8 month old, and for that I'm grateful!