365 Days That Have Changed Me… Forever

As I tie the last ribbon for the insane Pinterest idea I saw for Colton’s Wild West theme party, I just shake my head that he is a year old. So many people say “wow that flew by,” but for me, it feels like yesterday I was weighing Colton every day and praying that he was gaining just half an ounce, taking deep breaths as I tried to feed him in the middle of the night, but he just wouldn’t take the bottle, or saying so many times “we can do this Colton, we can get this last ounce of milk down.” I remember counting down the surgeries and telling myself we only have 3 more to go, if we got through this last one we can get through the next one and saying it’s just two nights in the hospital I can do that.
Those nights in the hospital took years off my life, sitting up all night wanting to help the nurses in any way and just wanting him to eat, knowing it would make him feel so much better. After the last and hardest surgery, I remember just watching his vital signs all night long and just touching him praying his oxygen levels would increase.
The fear I felt walking through Target thinking people we staring and judging my baby for the way he looked, or waking up in the middle of the night after a horrible dream of kids bullying Colton at school. These fears and dreams still happen but much less than they did last year. Colton has come so far with so much help from so many people. His journey is not over and there are many more surgeries to go, as well as a lot of speech and physical therapy to get him back on track, but I look at him today and see nothing but a perfect baby.
As parents we want the very best for our children, our children to be perfect, to be 100% in weight and height at every checkup, we want them to crawl and walk before their peers do, as we somehow feel that it means they are better than other children or that we are amazing parents. A lesson we can all learn from Colton is none of that means anything if our children, or us as adults, don’t see the beauty thats on the inside or have the understanding that every baby has traveled its own difficult journey to get where they are and no one should ever judge a child. Milestones mean so much more than a check in a box at the doctors, meeting a milestone has a whole knew meaning when you have watch your child struggle to breath or eat and the thought of him sitting up or crawling seems lightyears away. I am so proud of my 1 year old who is the crawling around, eating on his own, and drinking from a regular toddler cup and I wouldn’t trade these past 365 days for anything, as I am better mom, wife, and friend because of it.