Buh-Bye Helmet & my 200th post

Some of you may be wondering why there was an unusally large gap in my blogging. I've been working for a while now on the video of our first meeting with Elias. I'm really not great with editing video and it is exceptionally difficult when the job requires editing 4 hours of footage of your child crying, well screaming, into something that other people might actually want to see.

My goal was to have it up to celebrate hitting our 6th month mark. Well that came and went on August 1st. I decided not to blog about us being together as a family of 3 for 6 months until I posted the video, you know, motivation of sorts.

Then I decided I wouldn't blog about other random stuff until I got the video up. Now I'm at the point where I need to mess with transitions, etc. and that requires Brian's help. So, 10 days of no blogging and I figure I will just have to waste my 200th post on a random post instead of saving it for the video, as that might just never happen. Not that hitting the 200 mark is anything significant, it just means I have a lot to say about nothing.

Today is our 5 year anniversary! Brian and I have had a wonderful 5 years together. We decided when we were married that we wanted to wait 5 years before having kids. We made it 4 and 1/2. Although we had a great time together I sometimes wonder why we spent 4 and 1/2 years missing out on the joy we now experience day in and day out. I guess we just didn't know any better.

In other news, Elias is officially done with his helmet! Actually that happened about 2 weeks ago but, again, I was saving this 200th post for the video (sigh). There is definitely still room for improvement but we opted not to do a second helmet and are very pleased with the progress made in our 4 and 1/2 month experience.

These are the before and after pictures. I was actually pretty bummed when we got them because I don't feel they in any way do justice to the treatment. In this top photo you can see the "diagonal egg shaped head" I referred to in the first e-mail I sent home. The right is the "after" photo. As you can see the forehead made large amounts of progress and is completely symetrical now. There is still room for improvement on the back right side of the head but we are happy. Below that you can see the vast improvement made in his facial structure misalignment. In the before picture looking from left to right you can see how his face had a sloped look to it and in the after how everything is even.

This view is harder to notice but it also shows the progress made in the forehead as well as progress made in the strength of his neck muscles. The bottom set show progress made in the back flat part of his head. In the before picture you can see how the bottom part of his head was flat as a book. In the after you can see how it has filled out in a more typical head shape. This is the part of the progress where the pictures just don't do it justice.

This final set of pictures takes very close examination and oddly enough some of the before pictures look better because of how Elias was sitting. These show the correction of the ear misalignment (seen better in the bottom set) and also the correction of the back of the head flatness which has now filled out a lot.

The staff at Cranial Tech LOVED Elias. On our last adjustment visit the technician asked me, "when are you adopting your next child?" I was a little taken aback and she explained herself by saying international adoptees were their largest clientele (although I never saw any others in the countless appointments we had) and she couldn't wait until she would get to see us, meaning Elias, again.