For those who may not know, Connor had very minor surgery this morning. Everything went perfectly, and we’re home now and recuperating. He’s mostly normal, but a little groggy. Not sleepy, just a bit off.

Did you know that your tear ducts drain into your nose? Or, at least, they’re supposed to. With Connor, and about 5% of other babies, not so much. The result is very gooey eyes that sometimes crust shut. The avenue for this drainage starts out as a string of cells that eventually grow into a tube, but sometimes it doesn’t pop all the way. Most of the time this clears up on its own in the first six months, but sometimes it needs a little help. They take a probe and stick it through the passage, opening up any blockages. Here’s some information on the procedure. For those of you who know my friend Jonathan, his son had the same procedure about a year ago.

Connor’s surgery was scheduled for 7:30 this morning, which meant that he couldn’t eat anything after 3:30 a.m. So we spent the night getting up every three hours to get some food in him up until 3:00. You know, like we used to do. For three months. How soon we forget. I have no idea how we survived.Then we got up at 5 so we could get to the hospital by 6:30. Connor, fortunately, slept through most of it. Then we got there, talked to an army of nurses, anesthesiologists, residents, assistants, and various and sundry other medical types, and then off he went, calm as could be. They sent us to a waiting room. It was a small waiting room. We were the only people there. Seemed strange. We figured this was the waiting room for people having short, easy, low-risk procedures; no need to expose us to the parents frantically suffering from the major heebies. They told us they’d be by in about a half hour to tell us how it went.

Over an hour later, we were wondering if this was the waiting room where they put the parents of the children they planned to sell on the black market; they didn’t want to tell us about it in front of other people. Finally somebody we recognized brought in another patient; we looked up eagerly to watch her turn and leave again without a word. About two minutes later she came back, looked at us apologetically, and said that everything went perfectly, no problems whatever, and we’ll bring you to him in a minute. So we relaxed again.

Finally somebody took us to talk to the surgeon, Dr. Del Monte (Dr. Monte Del Monte; yes, really) who told us, again, that everything went well; that things were indeed quite tight, but they’d run some fluid through and it came out clear. This procedure has about a 90% success rate, so he should be okay (if we have to go back, they stick a small silicone tube in there for about a year to hold it open; thanks, but we’d rather not).

So he’s fine. Still a bit groggy, and I think his throat is sore from the ventilator (they controlled his breathing while he was under), but he’s back to his leg pumping ways.He and his mom are napping now. Not a bad idea.

For the past month or so, Connor and I have been going swimming on Saturday mornings.  Here we are at our first outing.  (As you might be able to tell, he was a little distraught.  See, what we didn’t realize at the time was that he probably had a slight fever, and so going into the cold water was maybe not the best idea ever; he spent the next week or so with the worst cold imaginable).

He likes it okay, though it’s not his favorite thing in the world.  He endures it with only a little fussing. He’s only just figured out how to reach for things when he’s dry; trying to reach for a toy in the water that keeps getting farther and farther away is just so frustrating.  My favorite part is the dunking.  I blow really hard into his face so he squeezes his eyes shut, and then dunk him under for a split second.  He always comes up with this adorably alarmed look on his face, as if he’s saying, “hey!  What’d you just do!  That was weird!  Stop that!”

The picture above was from about a month ago.  This picture, on the other hand, is me with my dad, around 30 years ago.