The Babe's Surgery

Just for a quick update...

Bentley's surgery will be on November 19th. What she has is called metopic synostosis where the plates in her head fused together before she was born. We're lucky she only had along 1 seam which is pretty uncommon, although its also uncommon to have it in a girl and the second child.

Here's how her surgery will go. She'll have a pretty small incision just inside her hairline. The plastic surgeon and neurologist will go in and cut out the seam of bone so that her head can grow normally. The surgery will last about 2 hours and she should only have to be in the hospital for a few days. After that, she'll need a helmet for awhile, but it's a relatively simple surgery (it's hard for me to say that because she is so small and it involves her head and brain, but we're getting used to the idea.) It sounds like the docs we have are the best down there which is really saying something at Primary Children's! Now that we know the day of her surgery we're planning on blessing her the first Sunday in November. We're so thankful for all of your help and prayers in our behalf and will keep you updated as the day gets closer.

Bentley Update

Here are some newer pictures of our sweet baby girl! She's 3 weeks old now and has grown an inch and weighs 7 lbs 11 ounces. She still doesn't love to eat, but it sounds like she might be developing a milk allergy and as soon as we get that figured out maybe it will change.


She's already much more high maintenance than Cyrus was, but she's such a good baby. She sleeps between 6 and 9 hours a night and rarely cries (she's a snorter!). So no drama there, but we've been to quite a few doc appointments in the last few weeks. Here's what is going on:

It's hard to tell in most of the pictures, but she has a bump on her forehead that we found out is because the plates fused prematurely. So, we have an appointment with a neurosurgeon down at Primaries next week to check it out and schedule her surgery. Hard to imagine giving up such a little one for surgery, but we know it's for the best. Without it her brain and head will grow abnormally causing developmental problems. We're also going in to the audiologist to check her hearing again. Her ears are so tiny no one is surprised she's failed the hearing tests so far, and at this point we're just hoping her ear problems are because nothing can drain out of her tiny ear canals!

Cyrus still loves his baby sister most of the time. We're so blessed to have such a good boy and beautiful girl! All of this just really makes us realize what a miracle these little babes are! There are so many things that we could be dealing with that could be worse. We'll update again as soon as we are able to speak with the neurologist and have the tests done next week.