Arrival of JJ

Its now been nearly a month since the birth of my son Joshua. I would have updated this blog prior to that but it turns out that all the whingey, moaning feeds you see on your Facebook wall about long nights and hard work with a new born are not complete rubbish after all.

I mean, this is different degree of tired. I thought I would be fairly immune to the late nights given my earlier lifes penchant for all nighters and late night partying. Trouble is, you could always catch up on sleep after those. Turns out with a baby not so much!

Anyway, Joshua James Ian Cockburn arrived in spectacular fashion by way of an emergency C section on the 21st June, after a 24 hour labour. I loved him from the moment I set eyes on him. Talking of eyes, something weird happened to mine, as when i saw him my own peepers leaked. Was a very strange sensation and I'm sure someone could explain what happened as I'm at a loss!

Looking upon JJ's face for the first time was a mixed bag of excitement and worry. Im not going to lie here, I was nervous about meeting him. What if, for example, his cleft was really bad and I didn't like the way it looked. What would that make me, as a father, if I thought my own sons facial defect was bad?

What if I felt I couldn't deal with his condition? What if I couldn't be strong enough to help him through his lifes journey with it? What if this, what if that?

You might be reading this thinking "how could you even believe you might think that about your own son?". Well I don't think I'm the only parent in the world that has ever thought this and therefore I certainly wont be the last. Turns out all your worries are rubbish, so for those in a similar boat You needn't even waste time stressing about it.

I genuinely didn't even see the cleft for the first 10 minutes or so. I was so overwhelmed with pride, love and amazed that I could help create such an perfect little person that the last thing I saw was the cleft. I saw a little guy, yelling his lungs out to all that would listen, and the sudden silence that came on him when he was passed into his mothers arms. I'm not a man to be moved very often, but this shook my foundations and was one of life's true game changers.

When I got to hold him and he opened his eyes and did what looked like, staring into mine, well, my heart melted. This is what I was put on his planet to do. To look after this little dude until the day my own time is up. Love isn't a strong enough word.

When I did suddenly focus on his cleft lip it dawned on me that it wasn't a full cleft as previously diagnosed. It didn't go completely into the nostril but only half way. I remember my first thought being how cute he looked with it, like he was born to sport one, like some sort of strange genetic fashion accessory!

After the doctors checked him over they also told us that he has a partial cleft of the hard palate (roof of mouth) and a full cleft of the soft palate (soft part of roof of mouth, bit at the back).

So what does this mean exactly? Well in the immediate future, he cant suck like normal babies, it would be a bit like you and me sucking lemonade through a straw that had a hole in it. So we have special bottles that we are able to squeeze when feeding him so that he can get his fill.

One of our worries was that he wouldn't take to this, but again he proved us wrong. The guy eats like some sort of starving Gannet. Since his birth he has been eating above his target every day. So yet again he proved my fears wrong.

In the long term, it means that he will have to have a palette repair as well as a lip repair and chance are he will need a speech therapist to help him along with his talking. You need your soft palette to pronounce certain letters you see.

Anyway all that's along way off and we will deal with that as it comes. If JJ continues to allay all my fears in the fashion he has already then I shouldn't even worry about it. But I will. Because I'm his Dad and its my job.

Littlebean

So, the birth of my son and heir, future leader of men and the free world, is due on the 1st of July 2014. A little less than two weeks to go.

"Littlebean" as I have taken to calling him (due to the fact that all early foetus pictures somewhat resemble a baked bean) will be here imminently, and there absolutely naff all I can do to slow it down.

I mean don't get me wrong, I can't wait for the little bugger to make an appearance, but that due date has seemed to exceed all modern understanding of space and time in the last eight months.

Eight months! It surely can't of been eight months because it genuinely feels like only a few moments ago that my wife was looking at me whilst holding a piss covered stick, with a face like she had won the lottery, but had to walk through London in the nuddy to claim the money.

This 8 months has been the fastest of my life no two-ways about it. The time frame is stuttered, like a dodgy DVD, there are huge swathes of it missing, with just a few important moments left as memories in my simple man brain. All of those are related to Littlebean in someway.

My theory on that is simple, basically everything except Littlebean ceased to be anywhere near as important the second I knew he existed. At that precise moment my lovely wife was explaining she was pregnant, with that odd happy-oh-so-terrified look on her Chevy, my life changed. It genuinely shifted on its axis.

I should first share with you that I have always felt I was placed on this mortal coil to do something special. Like I dunno, save the world, or become insanely rich and powerful, rescue cats from trees or some other such balls. To be fair as a 31 year old bloke with an ordinary desk job, newly thinning, graying hair and a rapidly growing beer belly, my feeling on this matter was starting to waiver.

At the 12 week scan I saw with my eyes the special reason I was here. This tiny miniature, stunning little human being, that seemed to kick about and turn his back on the scanner at every opportunity filled me with awe. Honestly blew my mind. I spent the next 8 weeks showing off the scan pictures of this special thing me and the wife had created to anyone that would look, like I was the first man to conceive a baby. Like god before me I had created man! See, told you. Special.

It was at the 20 week scan I was to find out just how special. You see, Littlebean, as I had suspected already, given the fact he will one day rule over you all, is no normal baby. He is one out of every 700, or as I prefer the 0.14%

Littlebean has a unilateral right sided complete cleft of the lip and probable pallet. If that last sentence has made about as much sense to you as a drunken man's 11pm ramblings, fear not. I had no idea what it meant either.

But as the most common facial abnormality in the world, we should know really. All it essentially means is Littlebeans mouth didn't come together completely from the two vertical halves that everybody else's does in the womb at 7-10 weeks in.

He has a gap separating the two halves of his top lip, which goes into the right nostril and probably separates the roof of his mouth too.

Its entirely operable, and operations will indeed be a regular part of his life up until the age of 21. He will certainly have at least two of these operations before he is 1 year old. Probably before he is 6 months old. The first to repair the lip, the second to repair the pallet (roof of the mouth). He will probably need several revisions throughout his childhood. At 10 he may need a bone graft from his hip, to repair his gumline too.

When I first heard this I was devastated, terrified and totally confused. But we all need to calm down. Its only a cleft!

This blog will serve as my ramblings about parenthood as I see it and experience it. Most importantly it will also chart Littlebeans progress through his cleft journey. If even one parent in a similar situation finds it even vaguely useful, the blog will have been worthwhile.

Oh, and his actual name isn't Littlebean. It's Joshua, and this is his tale....