Noah's Miracle : Mandatory Milestones

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Mandatory Milestones

I never watched him learn to sit.
I never watched him rock to crawl.
I never watched him pull to stand.
I never watched him brace himself to walk.
I never watched him take his first independent step.
I never heard his first word.
Milestones that cerebral palsy took away from me.

I see those milestones sometimes in dreams. They must lay subconsciously heavy on my heart if I dream about all I missed and all that he cannot do. I see him walking, I hear him talking. His words so sweet, he runs and plays. So vivid and real that sometimes I wake up and for just a moment I forget that it wasn't real. But I see it all in dreams. Just how it was supposed to have been.

The new year brought some changes for Noah. He gave up the bottle cold turkey, which was a huge surprise to us. We had been using a medical cup at meal times, and supplementing with traditional baby bottles during the day. Until Noah just refused to open his mouth and shook his head in protest and refused to suck on a bottle. So now he's drinking completely from cups. Something I wasn't sure would ever happen, even more surprisingly that it wasn't something we were working on him to give up. He just decided one day out of the blue he was done with baby bottles.

And January 2nd, 2015, a mandatory milestone happened... Noah lost his first tooth.

I had suspected it may be getting to be around that time that most children start losing teeth.   Yet, I had resigned myself to the fact that I may likely never see milestones of any kind.   So when Noah lost his first tooth, I felt this surge of emotions.   For a moment... a brief moment I was a part of how life should be - a piece of normal.   Something that other parents get to experience I finally got to experience too, right on typical child timeline.

Noah understood that he had lost a tooth, we talked to him about it, and explained the tooth fairy would be coming and leaving him money in for his tooth. We asked him what he wanted to spend his money on and he replied cheesecake (by vocalizing his "yes") when we ran down a listing of options he could spend his money on.   We were not surprised, he does love his cheesecakes.

Noah cannot sleep with a pillow because blankets, sheets and traditional pillows pose a suffocation risk, we had to get a little creative with where we'd leave the tooth for the tooth fairy. We told Noah we thought she'd easily find it on his dresser. So we placed it in a little tooth container for him.   And told him that she'd come when he was sleeping.

I knew that Noah wouldn't be able to check his own dresser for his money and might be disappointed with not being able to check under a pillow for the trade the tooth fairy makes, so I stayed up really late and stalked his room so I could catch the tooth fairy for him and take a picture. Thank goodness for Noah's bedroom camera as it made it a little easier to catch her in the act.