9 Months of Banana!

I am a little late on this as usual, but our sweet Banana turned 9 months old while we were at the beach in June.  I snapped some pics a few days later.

 

This first one is my fav :)

 

 

 

 

We also met with Anna's cleft team on June 22nd.  It was a long but good appointment!  We started with the audiologists who performed some hearing tests on Anna.  As I suspected, she has some hearing loss due to fluid build up in her ears.  This is pretty common in cleft kids, so she will get tubes when she has palate repair.  We hope this will fix her hearing but won't know until about 6 months after tube placement.  Then we met with Speech who asked us to feed her.  They were super impressed with her feeding skills!  Girl likes to eat (wonder who she got that from?!).  Then we met with the social worker... this is the one I am never really sure about.  She 's so nice, but I am not entirely sure what her role is and typically she just says things that make us upset (like when I was 20 weeks pregnant and she emphasized that our baby will have a scar FOREVER on her face and people will have a reaction to that and we will have to learn to deal with it...).  Anyway, then we met with the ENT who will be placing tubes in Anna's ears and lastly we met with Dr. Marcus (and a few interns of course- I always feel like I am on Grey's Anatomy when I am there).   Dr. Marcus thinks Anna looks great, but she is getting a small bump on her lip from some excess scar tissue. He recommends a small lip revision during palate repair.  Fine by me!  Buy 1 surgery, get 2 free?!  Not really (I wish), but we did confirm she will have Palate Repair + Tubes + Lip Revision on July 22nd.    It will pretty much be the same drill as last time- get up SUPER early (after not really sleeping the night before), 4-5 hour surgery time, 1-2 nights in the hospital, 2+ weeks out of daycare and in NoNo's  and around the clock pain meds...EXCEPT.... this time Anna is 10 months old and mobile and is going to be SUPER irritated with the NoNo's... I am dreading it to say the least. 

 

The good news is, after this we are hopefully in the clear for a few years!  Woo hoo- ready to get this behind us and celebrate her 1st Birthday in just 2 months.  How the heck did that happen?!  I can't wait!