We are overwhelmed by your support. Thank you so, so much, from the bottoms of our hearts, for supporting Leo and our family. He is truly the best little guy, who is having to put up with way more than his fair share.

Just today, he had a two-hour appointment for presurgical approval, his third such appointment, during which a team of nurses again spent about an hour trying to draw blood for labs. His veins — which apparently are thin, deep, and roll — kept blowing or just not delivering, and they eventually pricked his toe and manually squeezed his blood out into vials. He screamed so long and hard I was sure he'd crash after, but now that we're home, he's giggling to himself in his crib. The nurses covered all their blood draw attempts with poop emoji bandages. I couldn't agree more.

We'll spend the next week before leaving for LA enjoying every moment with him, and with the five of us together. It's one thing to scrub Leo's story of the especially hard bits before sharing; it's another to actually be updating our wills, since our kids' parents will be across the country together for a month, without them.

Leo's been our best sleeper by far, but lately he's been waking in the middle of the night, needing a parent's comfort. Hard to know if it's a run-of-the-mill sleep regression, separation anxiety, part of his diagnosis, a seizure that caused pain, or something else; there are so few absolutes when it comes to hemimegalencephaly. Last night, Leo fell asleep gripping my right hand with his right, and I wondered how much longer he'll be able to operate that hand. I'm memorizing the way he looks at me while being cradled, since he'll lose the right-sided vision in each eye and will hold his head differently to see us. We've been dressing him in our older kids' favorite hand-me-downs just so we can see him in them at least once, since we won't be able to pull clothes over his head post-surgery.

We're constantly thinking about befores and afters for him. The one absolute there is, the one thing that'll remain true before and after neurosurgery, is that this kid is the bravest and deserves the best. We're upending everything to make sure of it.