Today was Jonny’s last day of 4th grade.

At the end of each school year, I am reminded of how far my kids have come.

This is a video I took when Jonny was less than 3 months old. He had just come out of surgery for bilateral hip dysphasia.

Basically, his hip joints were very shallow and needed surgical repair.

It required Jonny to be completely immobilized for 6 months. He was in this cast from his armpits to his ankles.

You can imagine that experience. Not only the experience of the surgery, but caring for an infant with that sort of hinderance. Think about how you would change his diaper.

You can’t bathe him. You can’t clean under the cast. Basically we had to cut the tabs off the newborn diaper and stuff it into the small opening they made in the cast and then we had to wrap the whole thing in a 3T diaper.

Then, at around 2mos, they had to cut the first cast off and recast him with a “larger” cast…

To top it off, Jonny was super-colicky. The kid cried nonstop from around 10pm to 4am and sometimes longer.

Following the hip surgery, we would also have surgeries to correct a cleft in his palate and have tubes inserted into his ears to drain fluid build-up.

They were not-fun nights. I used to blog about it all, even back then. My wife and I would try to sleep in shifts. I remember some days, I would drop Jonny off at the nanny’s house and just go home and sleep instead of work.

I still remember how grateful I was when our in-laws dropped what they were doing and drove 4 hours across the state just to kick us out of the house and into a hotel room so we could get a full night of sleep, even though they had 2 young kids of their own, including a baby.

It seems we have come so far.

Through speech therapy… OT… PT… developmental playgroups, developmental preschool, all the IEPs, the fight for services and school placement and 1:1s and Paras and all of it.

Jonny has grown up into one of the strongest kids I know. Maybe not physically, but He has a heart of gold.

He lives to serve others. He will go out of his way to ensure the happiness of others, even if he has to make sacrifices to do so.

He is always willing to do what it takes to get his job done, even if sometimes, he doesn’t feel like doing it or if he forgets.

And he is the best big brother an Ausome boy could ask for.

He is and always will continue to be a “world-beater.”

Congratulations on a job well-done Jonny.

We are so proud of you.

Bring on 5th grade!