The things we take for granted

I got the emotional wind knocked out of me today. First, I accidentally startled K when I was giving her her vitamins. She aspirated them and turned bright red. She gulped air, sputtered, gagged, choked, and vomited, but didn't cough. She can't cough!!

She's okay now, aside from a residual rattle in her chest.

Then, I took her to Liam's basketball game. I usually avoid this venue as it is pretty loud and overwhelming for Keira, but decided to wade into this territory in order to a) help her acclimate and b) avoid getting another sitter (Side note: It's become pretty sad to me lately when Jeff, me, and the boys go out together without Keira. We usually have K with a family member while the rest of us can go do something rambunctious. I feel kind of empty in these situations. We even have one friend that jokes with me that we never really had a baby because as many times as we have seen him since she's been born, Keira has never been with us).

The game would have gone fine, really, except that towards the end I looked across the court and noticed a beautiful baby sitting in his daddy's lap, looking around and enjoying the surroundings. I thought that I thought he was just cute and that was that. However, I did figure that his age was probably around the same as Keira's and then found that I couldn't stop thinking about that kid....Wow, he really is so much more developed that K.

Right now Keira can easily pass for just a cute baby. Unless you hang out with infants regularly, you wouldn't really know there was anything amiss. What's it going to be like in a year or two if/when it becomes obvious that she is very different? How will I handle that? Today I learned another reason why parents of kids with severe delays don't take their kids out much. Again, it's not about the kid. It's about you, the parent, risking running into other children in the same age bracket as your child and tripping into a black hole of grief or what-ifs or what have you. I need to get beyond that. How will I get beyond that?

I need my sense of well-being not to correlate exclusively with my perceptions of how Keira is doing. I need that to be true for me, for her, for the boys, for my marriage. I can't be that wife/friend that can't talk about anything else, who has no identity of her own. Yet, I see glimpses of that already. They say that your love for your child and your grief over the loss of the child you thought you were going to have are not mutually exclusive. Thank God. Somewhere in there I need acceptance of the condition that she has, whatever it is. I fear what that process entails and dread that it's probably lifelong. I wish this didn't have to be such a long process. Something tells me it's only just beginning. Largely the fact that I've shed very few, if any, tears since that first 48 hours.

So, we had friends over tonight, which was a welcome distraction and positive movement, I would guess, in the right direction. However when they left, I felt really anxious, a flood of emotion. So I cleaned the office. Something I can control. Sort of.

Check out my knees!