An update on Cason and Wesley

We had Wesley all weekend. It was wonderful and chaotic and stressful and tiring and surreal and amazing. It was all that.

He left today for a few days. And it was just sad. :(

He is verging on getting confused with all of this back and forth. He doesn't understand and we feel strongly that it needs to stop. So we are pushing for Thursday to be our day when we have him for good. There was talk at one point of us getting him from Thursday to Wednesday the following week and then getting him again on Friday for good. I don't feel good about him leaving again and his current foster family doesn't either. And really, it's not for selfish reasons...we just think it will be best for everyone involved if this is it. We believe that his caseworker will support us in this.

In Cason news...

I am now comfortable sharing a story about him that I was so upset about for a while that I couldn't even write about it. It is about something that happened last Tuesday. So, we were getting out of the van to go into Cason's Osteopathic Manipulation appointment and we were in a very tight parking space. I was holding Cason and standing too close to the van because of the tight squeeze and when I went to shut the sliding door, I SLAMMED his foot in it. Like really bad. Oh my, I thought I was going to throw up. He wasn't wearing shoes and he immediately freaked out. I mean, it was the silent cry trying to catch his breath and then SCREAMING for a long time. It was like he couldn't breath. It was bad. I took his sock off to find a black, MAJORLY swollen foot. I lost it...like completely lost it. I couldn't breath, sobbing, guilt, makeup running down my face. It was terrible...and honestly, everyone in the waiting area probably thought I was a complete crazy person. The doctor came out and I told him that he needed to look at Cason's foot because I was pretty sure I broke it. He looked at it and confirmed that he thought it was broken as well and needed to be x-rayed. I was SICK. We headed to Trinity in Rock Island because Sean was working there and I thought he could come for the x-ray if he could step away for a bit. He was able to which was nice. Tate was SOOO GOOD...he knew that I was distraught beyond probably anything he'd ever seen from me and he was angelic. The tech thought his foot was probably broken as well, but to everyone's surprise, the x-ray showed NO FRACTURES! Woohoo! What a relief! However, I still felt tremendous guilt and got home and sat down to write Cason's birth mom a letter almost immediately to explain what happened and apologize. Because parental rights haven't been terminated yet, she had to give consent in the ER for Cason to be treated so they had to call her in jail to have her give consent over the phone. Ugh. She had no idea what happened, just that he may have broken his foot. I felt terrible as she must have been just sitting there wondering what happened. He is fine, it is healed for the most part...just a greenish colored bruise now. Whew. And I am pretty sure he still loves me. :)

In other Cason news...he has been progressing in leaps and bounds with his eating! This is the area that I felt he was most struggling with. We just recently got a new OT and have started trying some new techniques and they are working!!! He ate chunks of banana today, cottage cheese last night and half a hot dog (cut up in tiny pieces) yesterday with NO GAGGING! This is amazing, people! I have to feed him all of this with a spoon still, so at this point we are just hoping he'll learn to pick up food and bring it to his mouth so that we can have him transitioned to table food and milk instead of continuing to give him formula. :) Way to go Cason!!!! We are so proud of him and adore him more and more with every second that passes!

We were also informed a few days ago that his vision is 22/60 which is where the vision of a typical 11 month old tends to be. This was fantastic news as we thought his vision was possibly MUCH worse! Hopefully his vision continues to improve and doesn't end up being an issue in preventing him from progressing as quickly as he could.

Both Cason and Wesley are such unbelievable blessings and we just cannot hardly believe that we were given the honor of being their Mommy and Daddy!