delight all my love

Geoffrey Dilger, almost 1, saw his mother’s face for the first time Thursday. Before then, he could see Chrissy Steltz's mouth below her black eye mask and her forehead above, but nothing more. Steltz has worn the sleep shade since a gun accident shattered her eyes, cheeks, nose and part of her jaw 11 years ago.
After months of surgeries and a week of face molding, the blind 27-year-old attached a magnetized silicone mask to the front center of her skull and faced the world, Geoffrey included.
"Ear-to-ear grin … he gave me the biggest smile," Steltz told AOL News. But mom was quickly upstaged. "Then the cat meowed, and it was all over. He was like, 'Look at the kitty!'"
Before she was shot, Steltz was a good girl: a 16-year-old honor roll student in Portland, Ore. Her mother allowed her to move in with her 18-year-old boyfriend provided she kept up her grades. No one realized what she was doing after the last bell rang.
"I was a straight-A great student. The teachers loved me," she said. "They don’t know what happens outside of schools. That’s where the chaos and mayhem started."
On March 9, 1999, Steltz waited in the car while her boyfriend and another teenager broke into Fox Grocery and Firearms and stole 15 guns, rifle scopes and binoculars worth thousands of dollars. According to an Associated Press report from June 1999, the group planned to sell their take and use the money for pot, and boasted to friends about their "big lick," or successful heist.
Twelve days later, Steltz and friends were drinking when someone found one of the stolen guns. One of them shot Steltz in the face by mistake. The bullet only grazed her brain but ripped her face apart. He was sentenced to 27 months in prison for second-degree assault, while Steltz's boyfriend was put on probation for the gun theft. Police declined to prosecute Steltz, saying her shooting was punishment enough.
Regardless, Steltz served her time. During six weeks in the hospital, of which she remembers only the last four days, Steltz underwent more than a dozen surgeries and returned to life without much of her face, still holding 33 BBs insider her head.
She moved out of Portland to Milwaukie, Ore.; into a relationship with partner Geoffrey Dilger, also blind; and on to motherhood with Geoffrey Jr., born in July 2009.
Steltz pursued a prosthetic primarily for her son.
"She wants to have a face so that little Geoffrey will see her and know her with a face," Dr. Eric Dierks, the Portland head-and-neck surgeon who lead Steltz's team, told AOL News.
In addition to placing screw-like titanium implants around her eye sockets to attract tiny magnets in the new face piece, Dierks created a hole for Steltz's nasal passage, big enough to breathe through.
While he often works with trauma and cancer patients who have experienced facial trauma, Dierks had never before created a hole opening a patient's nasal passage.
Last week, Dr. Larry Over, a Eugene, Ore., dentist specializing in facial prosthodontics, and David Trainer, a maxillofacial prosthetist from Naples, Fla., crafted Steltz's new face.
Using a photo of the 16-year-old Steltz as model and her 27-year-old face as foundation, the team molded a silicone mask and created a corresponding model with dental plaster.
Trainer sculpted acrylic eyes, blue like the ones with which Steltz last saw the world; plus cheeks and a nose. The drugstore provided the rest: eyelashes, mascara, eyeliner and Steltz’s favorite bronze eye shadow.
Steltz's insurer paid the hospital costs, but considers her surgeries and prosthetic cosmetic and did not cover the surgeons' time, worth approximately $90,000 and donated by all three specialists. Zimmer Dental donated the implants.
On Thursday, the woman Dr. Dierks calls a "model patient" debuted her new look.
Husband Geoffrey felt her face and cried. Alexander Wang's mom saw her daughter's face for the first time in 11 years. Her sister Shyanne, born four months after Steltz was shot, hugged her. Then the family went home to see little Geoffrey.
AOL News spoke with Steltz from home, a day after her debut. While Steltz talked, she held her son and her mom fed him peaches.
How does it feel? "Incredibly comfortable," she said. How does it feel on the inside? "I'm squeezing with excitement."
Steltz speaks easily about her ordeal, with confidence and humor, traits that will serve her well as she pursues motivational speaking.
"I want to share my story with as many people as I can," she said.
"If I could go to the high schools and get just one of those kids to think twice, and maybe some of them to make better decisions. That’s all I care about, that none of those kids need to go through what I went through."