Eye See - on the other side

Because he had surgery first thing in the morning, Nicholas was not allowed to eat past midnight on Thursday night. I fed him his 9 p.m. feeding and watched him for a few minutes. I knew that this time tomorrow night, we'd be about 12 hours post-surgery. I wondered what that would look like.

We'd been told the risks - they were low and few, but there are always risks with surgery. The biggest risk was that the surgery wouldn't fully work and that the issue would be either over or under corrected.

To be honest, we still don't know if that has happened. We won't know for several weeks once the swelling has gone down completely and the eye has healed from the trauma of surgery if it's worked or not fully.

Friday morning, Mike and Nicholas left crazy early to get to the surgery center by 6:15 a.m. We had decided that it made more sense for Mike to go with Nicholas and me to stay home with Zach and Emily. I got pictures of Nicholas in pre-op, dressed in his tiny hospital gown and happily watching Disney Junior.

I got a call when he was taken back to surgery. I got a call when the doctor came out and said he was done, and I got pictures of a sleepy little man when Mike was allowed into recovery.

When he was discharged and they got home, I got sweet little cuddles from a groggy, red-eye child.

We put him down for a nap and he slept for some time.

Over the holiday weekend, he remained off and on groggy, probably the efforts of his little body to heal itself. But he was never grouchy. He remained the sweet little guy who thought everything his siblings did was hilarious. He continued to work on his modified army crawl to get to the toys that he wanted to see. And every time we turned around, it seemed, he put himself into a sitting position.

It was driving us crazy to know that he could do it but that none of us had seen it happen yet. We really just wanted to know how he was doing it.

Nicholas had his follow up with his ophthalmologist today. His eye is healing quite nicely, the redness has reduced significantly, the crusty yucks that were leaking out have slowed to almost nothing, and as far as we can tell, his eye is in a much better position than it was. He has another followup in 6 weeks and we will have better answers then.

And yesterday afternoon, I finally saw him put himself in a sitting position. He has decided recently that sitting seems cooler than laying down and continues to sit up more and more frequently. He decided to show both Mike and his physical therapist the trick and today in therapy, with some help, he pulled himself to a standing position against the couch and stood very confidently for some time.