The New Normal

I hope you'll forgive me, as I'm feeling a bit introspective today.  We can blame the pregnancy hormones, I guess.

It's just strange to me - how "normal" can change from person to person.  I have friends with kids who have no physical or mental disabilities, there are kids like E with a mild physical "issue" (funny - I have a hard time classifying it as anything else), there are friends with kids who have major medical problems looming constantly overhead (ie a life-threatening food allergy or a major issue with asthma), and I know of kids with truly life-altering disabilities who are wheelchair bound and require round-the-clock nurse care.  What becomes the new normal for us - daily exercises, brace donning and doffing for naps and nighttime, repositioning him during his play to better use the affected leg, watching to see how E's foot responds to the therapy, and prayers for flexibility; and what is the normal for my friends with kids with medical issues - like my godson whose parents have to restrict where he eats, read all labels on everything, and cook way more often than they ever wanted to in order to provide their son with safe, fun, foods so he won't be left out due to his life-threatening egg allergy.  These are the things you don't think about, or at least I didn't, when I was pregnant the first time.  It's just not what I imagined when I dreamed about life with our new little one.

Now, I hope it goes without saying that I wouldn't trade my child for anything in this world, and I'm not thinking that the small things we do every day for E's foot is in any way comparable to our friend of a friend whose son will not move around outside of his wheelchair for however long we are blessed with his short little life.  But I was describing our trip to St. Louis to some friends without kids, and I talked about the changes in how we were treating E's foot and the possibility of another trip out there next summer to either just have Dr. Dobbs re-check it or to plan for a few months stay to fix it again, and to her it just seemed so amazing.  It's normal for us.  It's actually way better than the worry and concern from last month when we thought E would be facing a foot reconstruction surgery because it wasn't healing perfectly.  But to my friend, it was outside of her perspective of normal.

It's just striking me as funny today.  Happy Friday!