It’s just life…a little different.

It’s been AWHILE since I blogged. Whew.

Life has been cray. cray.

Cuh-ray-zay.

Crazy.

What a year!

It was just a little over a year ago that we found out our precious little lump of sugar Apollo was about to show us what life was REALLY about. How fast things can change. How you NEVER know what direction your life will go. How things you never thought you could handle turn out to be the easiest thing you’ve ever done in your life. How love can take you a long way.

It’s been a big year. And yeah it’s been crazy. But, I’m fairly certain this crazy life of mine couldn’t be any better.

My last blog post was back in March of this year and it was talking about our little scare with our sweet little chunk when he had an extremely long seizure that quickly put him on a helicopter to Children’s of Alabama. (Big brother Atlas is STILL in awe that his baby brother Apollo got to ride in a HELICOPTER!)

And I’m happy to say that for the last seven months we have been SO BLESSED to have not had any more scares like that.

Apollo has been healthy and happy and making life so much brighter for everyone around him.

We finally got involved in Early Intervention. So far we are seeing a physical therapist once a month, an occupational therapist (who also dabbles on the speech/feeding side of things) and this week we meet with a vision therapist for the first time, which I’m pretty excited about. We’ve learned how to live and communicate and do things the only way we know how with Apollo’s vision limitations, but I can’t wait to see what insight she can offer into ways we can improve our therapy with consideration to the fact that he can’t see 100%.

So far his therapies have been going GREAT. He has improved so much. We just started rolling over BY OUR SELF last week!!!

That is one determined little boy lemme tell ya. He never stops trying. When he hears his brother and sister in the room with him you can tell he wants to play with them SO BAD because he just starts oooooh-ing and oh-ing and flailing those arms and kicking those legs trying his best to get his body to do what his brain wants it to do. And we finally accomplished some of that brain to body communication by rolling over! The joy on his face when he successfully rolls over is priceless. He is SO PROUD.

Watching your child do something for the first time is one of the best feelings in the world. But when you’re not certain what, when or even IF your child will accomplish certain milestones, actually seeing them do so…that feeling is indescribable.

So life has been crazy. And life has been exciting. And life has just been pretty darn good.

But because we all need a reality check now and then, life has popped back in to remind us that it’s never a good thing to get too comfortable being comfortable.

Over the last couple of months Apollo has started to seem very congested. His breathing has been pretty labored at night and he has had some difficulty while taking his bottles. He was eating well enough that it didn’t concern us too much to begin with.

Until it didn’t stop.

The occupational/speech therapist I mentioned earlier that we had seen did mention to us a while back that she thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we scheduled something called a swallow study just to make sure that while he was eating and taking bottles everything was going where it was supposed to go. Down the esophagus, into the stomach where it belongs and nowhere else.

At the time she mentioned that Apollo seemed to be eating great. But since the neurologist had let us know multiple times that it wasn’t uncommon for neuro babies to lose their natural suck and possibly need a feeding tube temporarily, we decided it was better to be safe than sorry.

Little did we know it would turn out to be a great thing that we had this appointment scheduled.

We went to Birmingham on Wednesday to do the Swallow Study and come to find out our little man has been silently aspirating while taking bottles AND every time he swallows food or milk a LOT of it is traveling up his nasal passage. YIKES! My poor baby! And we had NO IDEA!

So, long story short, we will be going back to Birmingham November 7th for a consult where they will then schedule the surgery for the tube to be put in. It will go directly into his stomach and that’s about all I know at this point. I have no idea what feedings will be like, what we will feed him etc. This is just one more big adventure in the life of Apollo.

And while most people that we’ve told feel sad or sorry, I honestly can’t say I’m feeling all that different. We knew life was going to be different for Apollo and we knew this was a possibility.

I think that is one reason I like writing this blog for everyone to read. So that people out there can see that life with a special needs baby isn’t as sad or scary or as hard as you think. It’s just life…a little different. And it’s still good. And I’m pretty convinced at this point that it’s better than I ever could have imagined.