Hello! First things first. My husband and I are expecting--in July! I'm 15 weeks along. We are thrilled and we've found out that he's a BOY!!!
Ok, now for some other details....I was born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate. And naturally curly blonde hair and brown eyes and a WICKED sense of humor. Now that I'm pregnant, when we went for our first trimester ultrasound, we asked the doctor to look for the cleft, and he did find it. He spent a lot of time looking, zooming, etc. (which is one reason we were able to find out he was a boy so early! ) and he said it looks as though he has a bilateral cleft lip AND palate. I know it's difficult to spot the cleft palate on the ultrasound, but, that's what he said it looks like so we're just going to count on that for now.
My mom and husband were with me for the ultrasound, and I know this brought back lots of memories for my Mom. I'm so glad she lives very close by, so that she can give us lots of advice and help.
I'm 34 years old, and as I'm doing research, I'm learning that a lot has changed since I was a baby, and some things seem to be the same. The Haberman Feeder wasn't around when I was a baby, and when I showed it online to my mother, she said she thinks that devices such as this will really go a long way in helping with feeding when our son is born. She said feeding me was a 24/7 job.
So, here I am. I'm hoping I can be of some help to parents with kids with clefts, in giving some perspective on the "outcomes" as an adult, and in offering reassurance that your love is the MOST IMPORTANT thing you are doing to help your child. I've read lots of posts here and there's a LOT of love and support here and that is awesome My parents did a terrific job of getting me the very best possible care, and above all, their attitude that I was just a normal kid has had a great deal to do with my self-esteem and confidence I married my college sweetheart, I am living the life I've always dreamed of, and I'm expecting my first child. Doesn't get much better than that.
I'm also here to gain some advice, support, suggestions, etc. on how to give our son the best possible care. It's funny in that by the time I was old enough to really have an awareness of myself and the world, a lot of my surgeries had already been done. It was my parents who had a much harder time of it, is my guess. So I don't know what it was like to feed me, hand me over for my first surgery as a 6-week-old, etc. What I do know is that I was born with some differences and my parents did whatever was necessary.
It'll also be interesting to talk to other adults with cleft lips and/or palates, too. It's not something I've spent a lot of time talking about--or even thinking about, really, for years. Now all of a sudden it's come to the forefront again. And life goes on.
In case anyone's interested, here are some photos of me, taken this past summer. (I'm in glasses in one of them because I went surfing with my contacts in and nobody told me that you can really hurt your eyes that way) But I'm including them to give you a sense of how things can turn out. I don't have any photos of me as a tiny baby, before my surgeries, so I don't have anything to compare and contrast. But you get the idea.