The Beginning.

Did we seriously just survive?  I can't believe four weeks have already passed by since we welcomed Sam into our lives.  It's been incredible and surreal as well as exhausting and overwhelming.  A few weeks before the c-section I decided I was going to start blogging about Sam and other aspects of our lives.  For family, for friends, for ourselves to document and remember.  The idea of blogging has always been daunting for me because I knew I would put too much pressure on myself to make it perfect.  So...I am now telling myself to ditch this idea out the window and just write and post whatever I want.  Who cares if it's not the most well-written or beautifully photographed.  It'll be what Kael and I make of it.  Here goes...

When Kael and I found out I was pregnant we were overjoyed.  After almost two years and a few rounds of infertility treatment, it was actually happening.  I started a week by week pregnancy photo journal and went religiously to my prenatal visits.  At 34 weeks, I was in the doctors office for a routine ultrasound and the doctor mentioned Sam's femur lengths were shorter than expected.  After doing a full-scale ultrasound with the ultrasound specialist and maternal fetal specialist, they confirmed that Sam has a type of dwarfism or skeletal dysplasia.  I was seriously speechless and overwhelmed.  We had to wait over the weekend until we could meet with a skeletal specialist to tell us what form Sam had.  Google of course freaked us out with all the possible lethal forms of skeletal dysplasia but we tried to be optimistic that our Sam was healthy and could live a productive and long life.  On Monday, we met with Dr. Krakow at Cedars-Sinai who told us the news that Sam has achondroplasia.  It was a relief because that meant that he wouldn't have a shortened life expectancy and would be developmentally on track in every way except for his height.  He would take slightly longer to crawl, sit up and walk.  I would have to get a c-section due to his larger head size and the risk of brain hemorrhage and cervical spine issues during a normal vaginal delivery.  So we started researching and reaching out to parent groups and LPA (little people of America) to get all the info we could about Sam's condition.  What we found was encouraging.  We knew there would be challenges but what parent doesn't have challenges...right?  We just kept on preparing for the big day and praying that Sam would be healthy.

On March 8th, our 7-pound and 10-ounce baby arrived at 9:08am and graced us with a gorgeous head of hair.  He was totally healthy and came straight to the recovery room with me after the c-section.  The 3-day hospital stay went relatively smoothly despite getting little sleep but having that automated, remote-control hospital bed was AWESOME.  At home, it took me (and Kael) twenty times the effort just to get me in and out of bed.  So glad I'm now recovered enough to get out of bed myself.


Some things we've learned about Sam in the first four weeks:
-He loves sleeping with one arm (or both arms) up by his head.
-He's constantly doing the "one-eyed stink face" especially when he's focusing on eating.
-He is one gassy baby...Kael's pretty proud and says our son is a real man.
-He's super strong!  When he got his circumcision, he kicked his legs out of the holders and the doctor was shocked how strong he was. 
-His arms are CARRRAZZY.  Maybe this is the case with all babies but Sam loves waving them around and shakes his fist when he gets irritated...it's so hilarious.
-His hair is uncontrollable.  like father like son.