Nose. Perfection. And not just how it looks. Because of course, I’m her mother, I think her entire face looks perfect, but the nose, it works perfectly. Oh sure, formula pours out of the right nostril sometimes. But she and dead owls don’t give a hoot about that. She breathes out of her nose. Without issue. Every day. I will be grateful for this always. We went a long time without knowing if she would be able to do so.

Ears. So far, so good. We met with her ENT doctor a couple weeks ago. Fluid is already building up in there, which the doctor said is completely expected because of how wide her palate cleft is. No infections yet. When she was only a few weeks old, I thought maybe she had some hearing loss issues because she never really seemed to startle to sound. And we have the world’s loudest beagle. Who barks constantly. Through naps. And all other times. S never stirred! But, when she began to interact more with the us and her surroundings, I realized that she did in fact respond to sounds when awake and that she is just a chill baby who, while in the womb, probably got accustomed to beagle racket.

Next step: tubes! Like seemingly every other baby in existence (in America at least), S will be getting tubes. The ENT will put them in during her first surgery. They will be tiny baby tubes that will eventually fall out, so the ENT will put in another set of tubes during one of her later surgeries.

We meet with her craniofacial surgeon tomorrow morning to discuss a game plan for her initial surgeries. We also should be getting a final diagnosis of the specific clefts S has. After a simple visual examination, the surgeon hypothesized that each cleft could be a Tessier 4 or a Tessier 5 cleft. They are both super rare, but if either of her clefts is a 5, that is just insane. Like, I found an article from 2006 that mentioned there were 30 known cases of Tessier 5 clefts. On the one hand, how cool to be that rare, on the other hand, I'm not so interested in her being anyone's case study. On one more hand, she's tough and if it could help another kid, being a case study would probably be OK. She underwent a CT scan a couple weeks ago (the same day as the ENT, thank goodness her Gami was here!), so the surgeon hopefully has all the information he needs to say for sure what is going on with that face of her's!