She was born with mild talipes equinovarus — also known as clubfoot — where the foot turns inward due to a short/tight heel tendon (you can see her right foot in pic #2). I had never heard of it before, and I thought it was just normal scrunchy baby feet!
Even though there’s no known cause, it’s more common than I realized. I’ve had friends tell me that they or someone they know were born with clubfoot, and I never would’ve guessed because they got treatment and now there’s no visible evidence of it.
So I’m grateful that a brilliant doctor named Dr. Ponseti was able to come up with a 100% effective treatment method via a series of casts and bracing to lengthen the Achilles tendon and straighten the foot. It’s a process that can take several months but it won’t impact her growth or development at all and she could still be a professional athlete if she wanted to!
She’s almost done with her second week of casts already and I’m so so proud of her for being such a champ!!!
I just noticed how she’s got her hand to her mouth in both pics of her in her cast… she loves nibbling on her fist since she ‘discovered’ her hand, it’s so cute!
Met up with some of our AmSam friends during our layover in Hawai’i. I love that our connection to our AmSam crew is so strong because of our shared experiences in Samoa. Time and space may have separated us over the years but we’ve had such an amazing community, and now that we’re all over the place, we’ll still meet up whenever we can and pick up where we left off.
So thankful for the ladies especially, Mia and Meagan, who organized this particular hangout in Waikiki and rallied some of the crew to meet baby Alava <3
We decluttered our house in prep for our baby girl, and sold a bunch of stuff at the Rotaract x Moso’oi Festival Swap Meet back in October.
We’d somehow accumulated more and more stuff despite our number of attempts at minimizing what we own. It was a chance to get rid of the unused masses of mess and allowed us to focus on a ‘fewer but better’ approach — especially with baby soon to come.
It turned out to be a blessing too because we have since relocated. We did the darn thing and actually moved off the island, after many many years of saying ‘maybe next year.’ And now that year has finally come, with opportunities for growing our little family.
I don’t miss our stuff so much, but I am very happy that we got to re-home pretty much all of it! Grateful for the Rotaract x Moso’oi Festival teams for making this swap meet possible. It was also really nice to see American Samoa embracing this mode of sustainable living — using and exchanging things already on island so they continued to be used rather than sent to the landfill.
