Lukas the little trooper

[Kodieh]

So, as with many people on the forum, I recently became a parent. Though, with a twist.

On 11/11, Lukas James Paul Hill was born with both a bilateral cleft lip and bilateral cleft palate. This has been an eye opening experience, and I'm very humbled by the perseverance of my son after a little over two months of life.

Lukas spent the first six days of his life in the NICU due to a breathing issue that went away quickly but also to help both me and my wife plus Lukas learn how we needed to feed/eat. He blew the nurses away with his progress.



Here you can see his lip, I believe he was only a few hours old in this picture. I can never tell because everywhere we were had no windows, so my whole internal clock was thrown off.



After the sixth day, we were allowed to go home. This was our first stressful day with baby Lukas because he was inconsolable, and we didn't know what we were doing wrong. Eventually it came about that he needed to sleep at an incline due to his cleft as well as he suffers from reflux. After we got his sleeping arrangements figured out, he became the sweet, quiet baby they raved about in the NICU.



He also got to meet Santa, who was actually G-daddy. I think he knew, because he was giving Santa a dirty look.



This was technically yesterday, right before his surgery to repair the lip. He's a fighter and got through it all great.



This is right now, as I stay with him in the hospital tonight. We're getting ready to go to sleep, and he's not having any of it.

I'll periodically update this with more pictures as he develops into his lip and more surgeries to come.

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