I am a recovering black thumb.

It’s not that I don’t care about plants. I care about them desperately- maybe too much. I’m a textbook overwaterer. When my plants start looking wimpy, I think, “Oh, they just need some water” and then they quickly die of root rot.

Last year, my friend Lori brought me a beautiful string of pearls succulent in a broken ceramic pot. The first thing I did was pluck a little string out of the soil, ruining the very fragile root system, while Lori looked on in horror. I thought, “Welp, that’s it. This fragile little plant isn’t going to last one week in my house.”

Not wanting to repeat past mistakes, I was very cautious not to overwater but every time Lori came over, she’d sigh and dunk the plant under the kitchen faucet and I would shriek. Under her tutelage, I finally got a feel for how much water the plant needed and it’s been thriving in my kitchen window. The last time Lori came over, she told me that it’s doing so great and I felt a little bit of pride.

***

We’ve officially had Big Boy’s (the child formerly known as The Baby) g-button for a year now. We’d gone so long without it. It felt like “Hey! This kid’s doing okay. Let’s poke a hole in him and stick a valve in him that makes him look like a human pool floatie.” It’s major surgery. If the button comes out and we don’t have a spare, we have to go to the ER or the hole will close very quickly. I’d had another mom tell me that she once mac’guyvered a temporary g-button for her daughter using a tampon and a Ziploc baggie.

While we fretted about whether to do it or not, my friend Rachel told me that there’s almost no g-button emergency that a towel can’t solve and she’s right.

The g-button has been amazing for us and Big Boy.

He’s gained weight, gotten taller, made huge strides in his therapies. I don’t think that we realized how much time and energy we were spending trying to keep Big Boy hydrated, fed, and medicated. Imagine that you have a kid who needs life-saving medication to stop seizures who you can’t reason with or bribe, who has sensory issues around food, who only eats or drinks what he wants when he feels like it. We were spending hours a day trying to get food or water into this kid.

With the button, if Big Boy doesn’t feel like drinking, I say, “Joke’s on you, kid. I’m giving you this water anyway!” and bada-bing bada-boom, he’s hydrated.

The biggest gift the button has given us is that it gives us time and energy to enjoy him. Instead of expending all of my parenting energy on trying to get him to finish the last two ounces of yogurt smoothie that have meds in it, we can have fun playing with his new laser gun.

He is magic.

And the g-button has helped us see that even more clearly.

No regrets.