Just keep swimming....

In the week since his surgery, Tiernan has visited the surgery clinic twice, spiked a few fevers and regressed significantly on his eating and sleeping.
These just seem like typical speed bumps for him. 
Thankfully we seem to be on the other side of them now. 
At the clinic on Friday Dr. Holland recommended we remove the dermabond and actively work at blood-letting.  His hematoma was beginning to liquify (ew), which is what we want.  So after getting the incision to open a bit more, he seems considerably more comfortable.  He slept all night again and is eating and drinking almost normally.
Unfortunately, a more open incision means we are still covering that site with heavy duty surgical pads, which we were hoping not to have to deal with anymore.  But this will only last a short time and then we will have a closed, and un-infected site.

One of the most important things God has been teaching me through Tiernan is to find the little nuggets of encouragment amidst a whole lot of frustration.  Here is an example...

Tiernan has always been difficult to get to sleep.  Anyone who has known us for even a week will know that.  Although he has been improving for the past several months, it still requires us to snuggle him to sleep.  Sometimes that takes 10 minutes and other times it takes an hour and a half.  When he is sleeping through the night it is easy to indulge him and do this because we love the snuggles...at 8:30 in the evening.  But this past week he has been waking up at around 2 AM and wanting to snuggle...for the rest of the night.  This brought me to the brink of insanity yet again, only this time I fought back.  I decided it was time (at 3 in the morning on Wednesday) for him to get himself to sleep.  So I just put him in his crib and stood there in the dark for about 30 minutes while he screamed.  And I prayed God would give me strength to let him work it out.  And He did, and Tiernan did.  He finally just plopped down and went to sleep.  Of course he woke up about a half hour later and Jason started that all over again.  And the next night we went through the same thing, but it only took him 15 minutes to give up and go to sleep.  And then yesterday at bed time, when he was not falling asleep in my arms, I just put him in his crib and sat there while he talked and played and then finally fell asleep on his own.  He only complained once and didn't ever really cry.  And then he slept all night.  So that will be our new routine.  We can snuggle for a few minutes and then I will sit in his room until he falls asleep.  Maybe soon we can start to work on him doing that without me in the room, but for now this is a giant improvement.