Happy First Annual Harrison Day!

All week, I've been mentally preparing to write a very detailed post about today--First Annual Harrison Day!

It was a year ago that I, Doug, Lori, and our parents sat in a waiting room at Strong and hoped to find out that all they needed to do to fix our child was slice open his head in a hairband of ear-to-ear stitches and cut out a cyst from inside his forehead. It's a terrible thing when that is the good news, but considering the alternative, we were so relieved when the neurosurgeon came out and confirmed that that was all that needed to be done. Instead of going into great detail about Harrison's surgery and its aftermath, I'll just share a few of my most vivid memories:

The moment when the young resident came to get Harrison was absolutely the worst moment of my entire life. We had thought that one of us would be able to accompany him into the surgical unit, but we couldn't, so we waited in the staging area with him and then the resident came, we said our goodbyes, and then he picked Harrison up and carried him through the double swinging doors.

I will also never forget seeing Harrison for the first time after his surgery, propped up in the PICU on the big hospital bed, still sedated, looking perfectly fine except for the giant, bloody zig-zag sliced into his head.

Finally, I remember, just a day after the surgery, how the wonderful nurses in the regular peditric unit brought Harrison a play gym and he went crazy laughing and smiling and batting that thing, even though his head had by then swollen up to the size of a watermelon and he could barely open his eyes. That was when Doug and I knew that everything would be alright.

So that's that. I'm going to leave it behind and move onto the big news of the day, which is that last night Harrison gave Doug a big fat shiner!

You know in the old cartoons when, say, the Coyote's plans would backfire and he'd get hit on the head with a big rock or mallet and a bump would rise up to the tune of an ascending slide whistle? Well, you thought that was fiction, folks, but that is exactly what happened to Doug's upper cheekbone just after Harrison head butted him. I was in the kitchen finishing up dinner when I heard Doug run into the bathroom yelling, "Harrison just gave me black eye!" I laughed, thinking he was just kidding, but when I went out there there was this inch-wide, inch-high, dark blue, um...ball right under Doug's left eye.

He looks pretty tough today. Too bad he has to admit that he got beat up by a one-year old.

Happy First Annual Harrison Day!