Fun With Hand-me Downs

I finally got a chance to go through the bags of hand-me downs that Emily inherited from her cousins and Ana, and this lovely outfit is the result. All the stuff was piling up in my office/guest room, so I just plopped Emily down on the bed with a string of Ana's plastic beads and went through all of it. I have no idea what purpose the little kerchief thingy serves, but it sure is cute.

She played with those green beeds for over an hour.

Emily's tape is now off of her face for good. It's the first time since she's been born that I've been able to really see her face, since the NAM obscured it for the first five months and then of course we taped her lip for 5 weeks during recovery. Sometimes I look at her now and just don't recognize her at all! I find myself staring at her face and trying to memorize it. Her scar is very prominent in the first picture, above, because she has a cold and her runny nose makes the whole area very red and livid-looking. I'm concerned about the ridge of scar tissue just below her columella since it seems pretty prominent now. We plan to massage the scar starting in a couple of weeks and apply some creme to the area to try to minimize scarring. We won't know what everything will ultimately look like for up to a year, so there's no use fretting about it now. Dr. Cutting really did an amazing job and we are very grateful for everyone at NYU's Cleft team. Which reminds me, it's time to send them another email about doing their Web site (I offered to help them put a Web site up about the NAM and the cleft team at NYU a while ago).