We are now 11 weeks post surgery. Harvey has recovered nicely and his scar is healing well. I am so happy to have the surgery behind us and to just be able to enjoy this sweet boy! He brings so much joy to us every day! He is almost 6 months old (just a few days away from it!) He is rolling around and already trying to crawl. He has been completely healthy and at our last check up on his lip, they had no concerns and said he was doing great!
Because I have had a few people following us that are going through their own cleft journey, I wanted to just share a little more about how things went after surgery (I meant to share sooner, but just haven’t gotten around to it!)
The first week was really rough and a little bit harder than we anticipated. Eating was a challenge. He was in pain and just didn’t want to eat. He was very fussy and did not want to be put down either, not even when he slept. All of this is understandable after having surgery and having around 50 stitches in your lip! It was a long week, but the day we got the stitches removed Harvey returned to his old self, happy and eating like a champ! If you are interested in seeing all of our posts about this cleft journey you can find them here or by clicking on the category “cleft lip”. If you are just now starting to read, you can see some before pictures too.
Here are a few pictures to show his journey after the stitches came out! Most are just from my phone because with 4 kiddo’s I just don’t seem to pull out the real camera regularly, but you can still see how wonderful our team did! Arkansas Children’s Hospital is simply amazing!
Harvey was super flirty with the nurse that did his admission vitals. He smiled at her the entire time!
This was right before they took him back for the suture removal. It was still hard for them to take your baby to do anything, but knowing the anesthesia was light and it was going to be so quick made it a lot easier! 
This is the first picture of his lip after the stitches were taken out. I couldn’t believe how good it looked!
This one is probably about 5 weeks after the stitches were taken out.
All of these pictures are recent, taken last week. 
Harvey is very expressive. His smiles are big and his serious face is also very priceless!
This is classic Harvey! Smiling big with his tongue sticking out! 
I think you can see his lip best here. We still have some scar tissue to get rid of but over all, it looks amazing! We have one gorgeous boy!
All the things 