March 15 2017: Jayna is One Year Old!

A year ago today, we couldn’t see a happy 1 year old crawling, pulling up, and stuffing everything she found into her mouth. 

A year ago today, we couldn’t see her smile, hear her cry, and hold her in our arms.

A year ago today, we couldn’t listen to the sound of her slow steady breathing as she slept peacefully in her crib.

We couldn’t change her diaper

Wipe her banana smeared face

Play peek-a-boo

All of those things we couldn’t see a year ago

But God saw all of those things

And as long as we could see God - that was enough

That’s always enough

Today Jayna is one, though developmentally she is still a 9 month old in many ways. Since we’ve had her home from the hospital, she’s had several appointments with the paediatrician and an appt’ with a preemi-specialist. We are so happy to report that she has been growing steadily along the doctor’s happy chart in a beautiful arc that puts her squarely in the 15th percentile for her adjusted age. For her actual age, she's in around the 1st or 2nd percentile! She’s no Jabba the Hut, but then none of our kids have been very chubby at this age. Since coming home she hasn’t had any breathing issues despite having had 2 or 3 colds. She has 6 teeth and drools like a St. Bernard, though thankfully she doesn’t eat like one! Candy might disagree with that assessment though, because Jayna still gets up several times a night and nurses each time. We are in the process of training her to get back to sleep on her own, a process we had forgotten about after 5 years of proper night’s sleeps, so we’ve had to relearn how to function on fumes and we are continually having to remind each-other that this too shall pass. :)  I have told people about my response to her sleep deprivation ‘tactics’ (don’t babies sometimes appear to have an evil plan to wreck our carefully constructed comfortabilities?). This time around it seems much different than with our other kids. Where before I would get annoyed, now not so much. Don’t get me wrong; given the choice I would much prefer she sleep through the night and take two very easy-to-sleep naps each day! It’s just that now I’m much more inclined to approach the situation with something akin to gratitude for her existence rather than impatience at the inconvenience. Where the struggle with the other kids had been to get over myself and the interruption of my agenda, now I find the hard part is putting her down and not spoiling her too much. Most times I’d rather hold her in my arms and inundate her with bounces and hugs and kisses than do anything else. I think that being 5 years older and hopefully more mature,(although that is sometimes easily debatable) than I was the last time I was here has something to do with that, but mostly I think spending her first 3 months visiting her in the hospital makes me so grateful to have her home that I’m treading dangerously close to Can-Do-No-Wrong-Child territory. As an aside, you have my permission to slap me if you see me venturing down that road!