Bananos!
Yali couldn’t have been fully aware of it at the moment it happened, but when Dr. Lin examined the white stitches beginning to dissolve in the roof of his mouth and said with happy animation, “He is now moving into the soft foods realm, which means anything that can be mashed with a fork,” bananas were now back on the menu.
“He has those abnormalities of the skull,” Dr. Lin added. (He might have actually used more medical terms that I forgot.) “But we all have those. Your right eye is larger than your left,” he told me. “So is mine.”
I guess I’d never thought about that in 31 years of living. I made a mental note to check later.
“Everything looks great!” Dr. Lin summarized a few minutes later. “I’m almost tempted to go off protocol and say you don’t need to be checked again until the next clinic – he just looks so good – but come back in a month and then we’ll get speech therapy started.”
Muy bueno.
We dropped in early at school that afternoon to participate in Puck’s class Valentine’s Day party at two o’clock. Of course all it takes is one glimpse of the little niño to call out the 3rd grade paparazzi. Yali buried his head against my neck once again as the kids crowded around and I tried to direct them back to the V-Day games so they wouldn’t miss out on winning prizes like silly putty and giant erasers. For this little boy – despite no one wanting to adopt him just a little over a year ago – it will never be said again that he is not completely loved.
We left to walk around the school once the snacks were presented. Cookies and strawberries weren’t on Yali’s menu yet.
About an hour later, Puck was pretty literally rolling around in a wealth of Valentine’s candy on the floor of Hans’ classroom while he compared loot with Heidi and another classmate.
“I think I’m going to faint!” he declared at one point. “Too much sugar!”
The level of excitement Yali exhibited at dinner that evening when he saw Oxbear peel a banana from the fruit bowl and mash it with a fork, was intense. Both arms went straight in the air for fist pumps. He was thrilled. There was zero banana mush left on the plate six minutes later when he finally put down the spoon. He would have licked that plate if he’d thought of it.
Later that evening I checked a mirror to see if my right eye really was larger than my left. Took me awhile to decide if I saw it, too. I left with an indecision.