One Ordinary Girl Rekindles a Talent. You Won't Believe What Happens Next.

This is all Timehop's fault.

Although, if we're really going to drill down the blame here, the fault rests squarely with my friends who have blown up my Facebook feed with Timehop throwbacks that piqued my interest enough to go, "Huh. Maybe I'll download that."

So I did. Shortly thereafter, I fell down the rabbit hole of nostalgia, discovering a link to an until-just-now forgotten blog of mine. I read a fair amount of entries, too, ones that detailed my previous blog-once-a-day resolution (which didn't suck so very bad, in all actuality).

Guys, I shamelessly adored my prose. It's embarrassing, especially since I lack any iota of self-confidence in any other aspect of my life (helloooo thunder thighs), but the thing is, I love writing. Even if it's writing about nothing, which is, well, y'know, most of the time. I enjoy creating with words, but I've discovered the caveat there: I don't like doing it when I have to. So, here I am, not having to.

What I did have to do, however, was set my almost-2-month-old son in his swing for a few minutes so I could write more than one paragraph at a time between rounds of

• Poopy diapers
• Pee diapers
• General cranky face scrunch-ups
• Rousing games of Get My Son To Grin at Me By Any Means Necessary **

** Generally involves an obscenely high-pitched repetition of "Hi!", belly kisses, grinning like The Joker, mimicking his own cooing, or any combination of the four.

The most adorable cause of sleep deprivation in the history of ever.

Naturally, having a child has been the biggest change that's happened over the past year-and-a-half. Lawson spends his day doing typical garden variety baby things: pooping, peeing, sleeping, guzzling, developing motor skills by grabbing onto an elephant toy in his little baby gym, practicing smiling, and waiting to spit up two hours after he's been fed/burped.

What separates this kid from the usual garden variety babies is his cleft lip and palate. When I was 20 weeks pregnant with the little dude, we found out that he was going to be born with a bilateral cleft (one cleft on each side of his nose). When you get that kind of news before your son is even born, when you're already worried about everything under the sun, that's really a one-two punch. We prayed, fasted, etc., in the hopes that somehow this diagnosis would have been just a misreading and that we'd see a facially complete baby boy when all was said and done.

March 23rd came, and so did our son. So did his bilateral cleft. Most folks would have been angry at God. At the very least, their faith in Him would've been shaken. Did I have a lot of questions for God? Oh yes. Was I angry, per se? No. In fact (and this is going to sound really weird when I say it), I love his cleft. It makes him unique. And, in about 2 months when he gets his surgery to repair his lip, by gum, I'm going to miss that cleft. That's the face I fell in love with. I'll be sad to see it go.

What I won't be sad to see go are the few difficulties that Lawson's had to face: wearing his nasal alveolar molding (NAM) device 24/7, not being able to suck down a bottle or breastfeed, sinus problems, etc. And without sounding so saintly, it could always be worse. Dear heaven, it could have been so, so much worse. Lawson's cleft is about the only thing that separates him from "normal" babies. He's smiling, grasping, cooing, focusing, and all the other things that babies should be doing at his age. For that, I'm abundantly, immeasurably thankful.

I was actually entertaining the idea of theming a blog around Lawson (to perhaps document the whole experience for parents that are dealing with this), and maybe I'll devote a few entries to his journey. But the thing is, the blogosphere is full of dedicated parents that are very good at documenting what's going on. That's not to say I couldn't do it, it's just, well, I think that there's more to my son than that. There's more to his life than that. There's more to my life than that. Heck, I couldn't even devote a blog to just plain mommy stuff (which is weird, since we now live in a world where you either are self-consumed with mommyness or you are self-consumed with hating those who are self-consumed with mommyness, e.g., Mommyish).

And so, here we are. Armed with a clickbait-y title that's sure to roll a few eyes, I'm sort of kind of back in the blog game. A game which, heaven willing, is more forgiving than Operation. Or Eat at Ralph's, for that matter.

TL;DR I started blogging again and had a kid while I was away. I might blog some more. I also like validation in the form of read entries and/or comments, because reasons.