Discovery

I've been so back and forth on the creation of this blog for a long time.  But I've finally decided to write it and to share our story with family, friends, and the world. I'm hoping this blog will be therapeutic for me and informative for others. 

It all started in May of 2013. We went in for our 20 week ultrasound excited to get confirmation on our baby's gender. We did not expect to walk out shocked with different news...our baby has a birth defect. The ultrasound showed a definite cleft in the lip and possible cleft in the palate. I've seen the photos from Operation Smile and knew the term but never thought it would be part of MY life.

A cleft is caused when the face does not completely fuse together at 6 to 8 weeks gestation. Cleft lip and/or palate occurs in about 1 in 700 births worldwide.

We some how hit one crazy lottery. Both our families have no history of birth defects. We are both healthy people. Our first child is amazingly healthy. We did not know where this would have come from. We tried to think back on our lives at the time. Was it stress? An illness? A plane trip? Something I ate? No one knows. There is no definite cause to a cleft.

The following weekend was spent in heavy research mode. We had to know everything about clefts. What causes it? How is it fixed? We read up on the surgery process. Looked at before and after pictures. We familiarized ourselves with the different repair techniques and the different degrees of clefts. We now know a lot more about clefts than we would like. This first year is going to be a tough road with more bumps along the way for the future. It's going to be a long journey...it's going to be an odyssey.