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"  My son is exceptionally handsome, with a killer smile. He is bright. He plays softball, rides a bike and enjoys the same things I do, like hanging on the beach.   This is what I imagined my son would be like when I first learned, eight years ago, that I was pregnant with a boy. What I never expected: that Max would have cerebral palsy.   The day after Max was born, he ended up in the pediatric intensive unit. I&amp;#039;d had an easy pregnancy, working until the very end, and a delivery that ended in a C-section when Max didn&amp;#039;t progress through the birth canal. The next morning, as I was feeding Max, he turned blue. I yelled for a nurse; she whacked him on the back and said it was common for babies to have mucus in their lungs.   A few hours later, he turned blue again; this time, the nurse whisked him up to the intensive care unit, where a resident realized he was having seizures. They sent him for an MRI. Two days later, the hospital&amp;#039;s top pediatric neurologist wanted to talk with me and my husband, Dave.   &amp;quot;Your baby has had a stroke,&amp;quot; the doctor said, gravely. &amp;quot;A bilateral stroke.&amp;quot;   I was too shocked to even cry. A stroke? Wasn&amp;#039;t that something that happened to elderly people? How was it possible that my newborn had suffered a stroke? Dave put his head down on the table in the conference room and sobbed.   As it turned out, there is an estimated 1 in 4,000 occurrence of strokes in babies. The doctor told us the grim possibilities: Max might never walk or talk. He could be cognitively impaired, and have vision and hearing problems. Not only was my baby not going to turn out to be the child I&amp;#039;d imagined, but he was also going to be my worst nightmare.   Those first few years with Max were the toughest of my life. Early childhood is a time defined by milestones, and Max didn&amp;#039;t hit any of them. Reading What to Expect The First Year made me cry\u2014I ended up giving it away. At friends&amp;#039; birthday parties for their 1-year-olds, I watched all the other kids his age walking, babbling, shoveling cake into their mouths, and realized just how far Max was lagging behind. He wasn&amp;#039;t crawling, and even grasping a spoon was challenging for him; the brain damage had impaired his muscles.   All parents have expectations for their child. Sometimes they&amp;#039;re beneficial: You can set the bar high and help him leap to it. Yet they can be dangerous, too. My hopes for Max only set me up for disappointment. I was so focused on his doing things in the usual way\u2014the way so-called &amp;quot;typical&amp;quot; kids do\u2014that I failed to enjoy the smiley child in front of my eyes who actually was accomplishing things, only on his time frame, not anyone else&amp;#039;s. &amp;quot;Look at what he is doing, not at what he isn&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; a doctor told me, and I took his words to heart.   As the months passed, I grew to appreciate every mini-move forward as much as the major milestones. At age 2, Max began to crawl. Then he scooted around with a walker\u2014defying the doctors who said he might never walk. On his third birthday, he tentatively took a few steps from his dad&amp;#039;s arms into mine and we both cried tears of joy. The next year, he said his first word (&amp;quot;No!&amp;quot;).   Time doesn&amp;#039;t just heal all wounds; it refreshes your sense of hope. It helps you see all the possibilities that exist instead of mourning the ones that don&amp;#039;t. To this day, no expert can tell me what the future holds for Max, so I&amp;#039;ve learned to have but two expectations for him: that he do stuff as best he can and that he stay happy. He does, and he is.   Max is 8 now. His speech is limited and sounds slurred, so he uses an iPad with a communication app to speak words for him. He is on a Little League team for kids with special needs, where a volunteer helps him hold the bat\u2014and he whacks that ball hard. He has balance and muscle coordination issues and cannot yet ride a two-wheeler, but he speeds down our street on a little tractor like a demon. He has some cognitive delays but he learns fast and, of course, knows just how to torture his 6-year-old sister.   He is bright and exceptionally handsome, with a killer smile...like the son I always imagined.   Ellen Seidman, a writer and editor, writes the award-winning blog LoveThatMax.com.   Click here to go back to the main story page. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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