The days are long but the years are fast

I can't believe summer is over. Just like that, it's September, Charlie's surgery was a couple of days ago, and he starts preschool next week. My heed, she reels. And I haven't even posted about our summer yet.

Yep, I did say surgery. I didn't post about it before because I was trying not to fret, but fret I did nonetheless. How can you not if your sweet baby is going to be in pain? Although it wasn't surgery, per se. There was no incision, thank god, but there was general anesthetic. This was a procedure to (please, please) fix his reflux so we can take Charlie off of at least one of his meds. It's basically two injections that will shore up the bladder wall and stop that annoying (and potentially damaging) two-way passage of urine between Charlie's kidneys and bladder. We'd like our urine going one-way only thank you very much! We talked about the operation a lot with Charlie and read every single "X goes to the hospital" book I could get my mitts on (I recommend the Franklin version over Curious George). And we talked about what was going to happen and how Charlie would get Jello for breakfast because it was a special day, and after the operation we could get chocolate milk from the cafeteria on the way home.

All things considered, the day went very well.

We fed Charlie copious amounts of Jello for breakfast. We topped him up with more before his 10:30-no-food-or-drink deadline. The nurses at CHEO were awesomely friendly, and Charlie was so chatty they decided not to give him some preliminary sleep meds because they could make him "angry-angry instead of sad-angry" when he woke up from the anesthetic. Funny, they never mentioned that before.

Charlie was great just until the hand off. Then he started to cry, and so did I. Good thing HS can hack this stuff. We handed over our baby, and they whisked him away. As we left we could hear Charlie talking about the baby in his tummy to the nurses, so I felt better. (Charlie is convinced that his has a baby in his tummy. It's a girl, and her name is Cracker. Lovingly named after his favourite snack food, but boy that name gets a few raised eyebrows. I'm pretty sure my MIL was quizzing Charlie about possible babies in MY tummy -- I brought Materna to her house, so it makes sense -- and hence little baby Cracker was conceived. I am not pregnant at this time, but we'll see next week!)

The surgery went very well. Textbook even, hurrah! But man that anesthetic f*cks them up. We definitely got the sad-angry at top volume. But after a little nap on the way home, Charlie was much better. And after a half-litre of chocolate milk, almost back to normal.

I'm exhausted, but he bounced back just fine.