Half a day from now, my little girl will be placed under the influence of anesthesia for the fourth time (I believe) in her life. Tomorrow morning Katy’s deflux surgery begins at 9:30 am at Cardinal Glennon.

This has been a strange lead-up to this event. After the original surgery was postponed, all the expectations and fears with something like this just went into limbo. I know they’ve been wearing on Shel and I. It’s just that it’s happened behind the scenes. It hasn’t been something that we have really discussed since January. I can remember Katy’s first surgery on her hip. We sat up for hours and hours wondering if we were making the right decision to do this to our child.

This time? We’ve been so busy with life in general, it’s like the stress of this has snuck up on me. Looking back, I can tell that I’ve been short tempered with everybody. I’ve been exhausted all the time. I just haven’t been myself. And I know Shel hasn’t slept for the past three days. Have we blamed this on the surgery? Not really. Until today, I hadn’t really even thought about it. Now that it’s here, I just want it over and done.

Katy is definitely Michele and my child. She only wants to be outside. Never mind that she can’t walk and is ruining her clothes by butt scooting over cement, and grass, and blacktop. All she cares about is being outside and she lets us know it. Boy, does she let us know it.

This evening we took advantage of the nice weather and had her gait trainer out on the front driveway. She really had to use all her strength to go up the small incline on our driveway; so much so, that she was exhausted after only about 15 minutes in her walker. Maggie blew bubbles with her for awhile, but Katy wanted the bubble bottle for herself. This is akin to giving a pig mud. Give Katy the bubbles and prepare for bubbles to be all over Katy.

I’m attaching the first video I’ve been able to catch of her crawling (not very far in this one). The best part of this is that she’s actually trying to jump on the trampoline. It’s not that she can’t crawl at this point; she’s actually trying to do something else.

Hope for the best tomorrow. We’ll post as soon as we have news.

Todd