Peach

Fuzz!!!!!!!

Even as he tries to help me type this post, I can see soft, brown fuzz on his head.

It was NOT there yesterday.

Yay!!!

His First Big Boy Bath

...since that last bath, where the whole nightmare began. (You can see his two top chicklets in this pic.)

A very different atmosphere today! Excitement warred with irrational fear as I worked to keep my heart inside my chest.

He's making serious progress with his walking, taking 8 to 10 steps to reach us. Of course every step is a major celebration.

I've been avoiding posting for some time. My conflict lies not only in my professional PR, but also in that, finally crawling out from under this heavy cloud, I don't want to look too closely at why we're not 110%.

I hope those well-intentioned don't take my following self-observation to heart, as it's merely a detatched examination. In all of my nervousness and excitement at re-opening my business, I forgot to prepare for the inevitable questions. They hit me like a burlap sack of bricks on Day 1. While I appreciate the concern and interest, I cannot help but wonder how long it will take to shrug the association. I'd just begun to not think of our family as 'special', to feel light and free. We'd slowly started bringing him out to places where people didn't know of his illness and saw him only as a tyical baby. Those sincere questions slowly began to cloak me down again, closing off my oxygen. I've got to figure out how to equip myself to better handle this.

The correct answer always is that everything is fantastic. In truth, our struggle continues, in some ways more hurtful because we feel we should be dancing on the rooftops. After living as two separate team mates for so long, tossing us two cats into the hamster ball together has been a ride. We have yet to fully retract our claws from battle and the flare ups are instant and brilliant. Add to that the pressure of getting our fiscal ball rolling, and it's like walking through waist-deep sludge, swinging big, beefy mallets at each other. We're working hard to get our lines of communication back up, to re-learn the dance that once came so easily to us.

We're almost there... I can almost taste how beautiful it was and could be again.