Grins and Giggles

We know people have been asking when surgery will be in the comments and we never got around to posting something about it. The first surgery is on Tuesday. It's going to be a fairly simple procedure where they will be putting in a orthodontic device that will bring the cleft closer together. At our last appointment with the plastic surgeon he said that if they get a good enough result with the Latham device that they may be able to do the lip repair in one surgery instead of two. It will only take about a half hour. We have to stay over night for observation. The toughest part will probably be the adjustment for him to have some thing stuck in his mouth.

Latham appliance on maxillary cast

Anyway, the point of this post is that we wanted to get a video with him smiling before they started the process to change his little smile. Usually whenever he smiles and we whip out the camera, he just stares curiously at the camera but today we got really lucky and actually captured his first real laughs on camera. You may hear me cracking up as well on the video (I know I sound like a dork too but it's cool because I do it for Ezra).

Also, we found this really cool story written by the founder of widesmiles.org, a cleft organization, that expresses how we feel about Ezra's surgeries pretty well. It almost made us both cry. If you want to check it out or show it to your kids click here.