The Impossible Girl

For fans of Dr. Who, you will know that "The Impossible Girl" refers to one of his companions, Clara Oswald, who seems to be rather typical but turns out to have quite a surprising life story. That, in a nutshell, describes Anandi. 

Last week, we took Anandi to Spokane for a sedated ABR, which tests the function of the auditory nerve. She'd recentlly failed an electronic test of her cochlea in both ears in the frequency range that would correspond with a quieter speaking voice and below, which explained why she had started saying, "What you say?" and "I can't hear you!" at times. She had never been able to reliably complete a standard hearing screening that involved raising a hand in response to a tone administered through headphones, as her responses were too random. But over the years, speech therapists and others had reassured us that she seemed to have normal hearing, as she was able to imitate all the phonemes correctly, even though she needed a lot of coaching to pronounce things correctly on a consistent basis. She also had had a normal tympanogram (functional test of the middle ear/eardrum.)

Nevertheless, David and I too often experienced her as functionally deaf, and our gut instincts said we needed to follow up with further testing. We were also growing increasingly concerned by her expressive language delay, as her speech gains were no longer tracking her chronological gains.

The results of the ABR were unequivocal, and the doctor gave us a diagnosis of Auditory Neuropathy Spectrum Disorder (ANSD), formerly known as Auditory Neuropathy/Auditory Dyssynchrony (AN/AD). Functionally, this means that while Anandi can hear (although even that is impaired in the lower frequency ranges), her auditory nerve doesn't properly synchronize the incoming sounds so that they're intelligible to her. The analogy we were given is listening to static between two radio stations. You can hear words being spoken, but you have to struggle extremely hard to decode the words being transmitted. It tends to worsen throughout the day as the auditory nerve becomes fatigued, which correlates with our observation that after school and in the evenings she would become increasingly withdrawn, irritable, irrational, etc. It also makes it extremely difficult to impossible to distinguish speech when background noise is present. Hence, she has used her cleverness to follow cues and imitate what others are doing when she hasn't been able to understand in classroom settings, etc., and thus has managed to fly under the radar for having a severe hearing disorder diagnosis.

The amazing thing about this diagnosis is that it's normally given to much younger children, as their lack of language development would lead to this testing much earlier on. Only recently has she begun to verbalize not being able to hear/understand at times, but this isn't a progressive condition; she's most likely had it since birth. It's a very rare condition to begin with, but fewer than 1 in 14 diagnosed with it will ever develop normal speech and language. The fact that Anandi has coped and adapted to the distorted sounds she has been hearing and managed to develop the level of understandable expressive language she has (currently about a 4-year old level at age 7-1/2) without any interventions whatsoever is bordering on the...well, impossible. She has had to struggle with a very uncomfortable sensation for years without her parents and teachers being aware so that accommodations and interventions could be made. She has, in fact, been quite a trooper! I feel both humbled by her miraculous accomplishments despite our missing this staggering piece of information, and ashamed in retrospect for how impatient I've been with her at times for her "not listening" to me.

We will be following up with an audiologist to try both FM transmitters and hearing aids; the former is useful in classroom situations to boost the signal when there is background noise, and hearing aids to boost it in general. But sometimes the hearing aids merely amplify the static. Cochlear implants have sometimes had dramatic effects, seeming to synchronize the auditory nerve transmissions and clear up the static, but other times they have had no discernible effect, and we are by no means ready to consider such a drastic intervention. So we will be moving forward with prayer and hope that we will be able to find a way to improve her hearing, and that our "impossible girl" will have an easier time of things moving forward.

2400

My 11-year old and I figured out a short time ago that there are approximately 2400 days left until June of her senior year. It might not be the day she graduates or moves out, but it was a good marker of how many days of her childhood we have left to spend together. And her "childhood" is certainly going to pass by long before then. It gave me pause to put a hard number to those days.

"2400" is now a mantra for my daily interactions with her, as I know it's so easy for me to focus on her exasperating habits or annoying shortcomings, especially since she has entered puberty and is approaching teen-dom. This numeric reminder now serves to help me put those annoyances into perspective. "2400" I think as she rolls her eyes at me when I ask her to pick her clothes up off the bathroom floor or unearth her desk and bed from the mound of random belongings piled on top of them. "2400" I think as she grumbles about bedtime or TV limits.

"2400" also serves as a gratitude counter, filling me with joy that I have that many more days still to enjoy her unique and funny and unpredictable presence. "2400" I think as she rushes blurting mid-sentence into the kitchen, her cockatiel perched on her shoulder, pointe shoes on her feet, as she answers my beckon to unload the dishwasher. "2400" I think as I watch her perform ballet and Celtic dance on stage, draw in her sketchbook, or ride her horse into a herd of cattle to separate out a steer with a blue ear tag. "2400" I think as we snuggle together and watch a gripping episode of "Agents of SHIELD" or "Dr. Who." "2400" I think as I tuck her in and read a chapter of Redwall aloud to her, grateful that she still appreciates and cherishes our bedtime routine.

Of course, 2400 is no guarantee, either. It could be 1400, or 400, or one. Tragedies befall even those who are cognizant of the clock ticking.

I remember snippets of song lyrics: "Life is just another terminal disease"..."Live just like you're dying"..."I want to live like there's no tomorrow." There is wisdom in those words, to be sure. But for me, "2400" has proven to be the most potent reenforcement of the idea they contain. And the sad thing is, I know that number is now in the 2300's, as we calculated this a few weeks back. My hope is that our good days will outweigh our bad, and that the days we spend enjoying each other's company will have the effect of multiplying those days. Sometimes I think the feeling we get of time passing too quickly is a result of time spent unsatisfactorily, that unhappy days seem to subtract more than their actual total from our allotment of time with our loved ones.

So here's to multiplying today by two...or three, or more!

Chaosing

slog (verb): to keep doing something even though it is difficult or boring : to work at something in a steady, determined way

September felt like one long chaotic slog.

"Slog" sounds like such a negative word; perhaps I can invent one that describes the intense activity level without being pejorative, as I truly enjoyed a lot of it. But "to keep doing something even though it is difficult" surely applies. How about "chaosing through September." I haven't seen "chaos" used as a verb before, but that seems like an oversight.

The transition from summer chaos to school year chaos included: helping my previously homeschooled daughter to hit the ground running in public school, where she is playing clarinet in band and singing in the choir (which meets before school two mornings a week); my husband and I stepping up big time as booster parents at our daughters' dance studio, including creating a float for the rodeo parade and an online registration/billing system for the studio; participating in the county fair as a 4-H parent and helping my daughter participate as a 4-H kid (including cleaning poop off a hen's feet with a toothbrush at 7:30 AM); adjusting to the extracurricular activities schedule (Celtic dance, ballet, and horse events for our oldest daughter; ballet/tap dance and therapy for our youngest daughter; play dates for both); starting Knowledge Bowl practice sessions at our house with my daughter's classmate; and catching up on weeks/months/years of deferred projects around home while the kids are at school.

I also traveled to Missoula to help a friend move her elderly mother out of the home she'd lived in for 47 years, and then helped her in her seamstress shop when she returned and was buried in bridesmaid dresses and wedding gowns. (I'm not sure how much help I was; sewing beadwork and ripping out seams on intricately layered formal gowns isn't my forte!)

Several people have asked me what I do now that the girls are both in school full time. I should have created a time-lapse video of September's activities to hand out in reply. It's just too hard to explain how "all that free time" hasn't really been all that free yet!

This morning I awoke at 3:53 AM and couldn't get back to sleep, I was so filled with careening emotions. I think I'd been dreaming about something upsetting. At one point I even snuggled up with my oldest daughter for a bit just to feel close. I miss our time together from our homeschooling days. I have some regrets about the decision, but I knew that was inevitable. I want to connect with her meaningfully in our limited time together, but it's so hard to find the time now. I rejoice in her happiness with her new friends, as she's a social butterfly who hadn't had much luck finding bosom buddies in the homeschool community. But it pains me when she describes the boredom and frustration she experiences because of the inanity of the school curriculum. It's exactly as I predicted. Social gain, academic loss. I'm trying to get her into the gifted/talented program, but I've been told "it's a process", and it sounds as if she'll be lucky to be admitted to it before the semester ends. Too bad, too, as they're focusing on writing this semester.

Even though home isn't her primary "school" anymore, we can still definitely make it the primary center of learning. I think I'll encourage us both to sign up for NaNoWriMo in November, and that can more than take the place of a G/T writing class. My husband is thinking of more interesting ways to teach her the science of electricity and magnetism that they are covering in an excruciatingly dull way at school, and that can happen as a fun weekend or evening activity. And who knows...we might end up doing hybrid homeschooling, as some families do: 3 Rs and science/social studies at home, band/choir/theatre/sports at school. She'd still have the advantage of seeing friends at school, but wouldn't have to be there for so many hours a day, and she could get a better quality education on her core subjects at home. I'm appalled at how low the school standards have gotten. The kids don't even get to know if they've gotten the correct answers in math! "Correct" is apparently now an oppressive white male patriarchal construct that has been rightfully purged from the curriculum. Gack!

October feels filled with promise. The days are back within my preferred temperature range, and I feel a surge of optimism during this, my favorite season of the year. It feels like a season of preparation, preparing for good things. Perhaps I can come up with a verb for October. "Optimizing" seems like a good candidate. It sure beats "slogging"!

The Tempest

I've been preserving Internet pages by not writing unnecessary blog posts for the past three months.

Well, that's the most creative excuse I can come up with. I have no good excuse except a general feeling that I couldn't "allow" myself to spend time writing a blog post when I had so many undone things on my to-do list. That, and a general feeling of malaise that colored everything blah. Who wants to write about blah?

Shortly after my last entry, my daughters performed in their dance studio's production of "Mary Poppins", and grandma and grandpa made the long trek north from Sparks, NV to see it. My 11-year old took time off from homeschooling the week they were here. When they left, she was balky and argumentative with me as I tried to wrap up the school year. She seemed to think she should be done with school for the year, even though her friends at public school still had a week of school to go.

Things escalated one day as I was requesting her to read aloud to me while we were driving her sister to her therapy appointment, with the goal of finishing the book she'd been reading to me for months (at ever increasing intervals, even though it was one she likes and had picked herself.) She was refusing to do it, and I ended up grabbing her book and hurling it out the window, saying, "You're right. We're done. You're fired." Six years of homeschooling, wrapped up in one impulsive gesture. It had been building to this point for the past year and a half, but it still came as a shock when it happened. (I did go back and retrieve the book, but not before it had been run over. The tread marks on it make a nice commentary. I might put it in a shadowbox display at some point, but for now, it's sitting in obscurity on a shelf.)

Over the next few days, we discussed (in calmer tones) how it just didn't seem like we were enjoying homeschooling anymore, and how it was generating a lot of friction between us. I told her I valued our relationship more than I valued homeschooling, and I thought she might benefit from having someone else as her teacher. She agreed, although she still was shocked that I'd "fired" her as my student. (She admitted she'd fired me in her head several times as well. I'm sure I deserved it, too!) We've even laughed about the tread marks on the book.

Even though we'd left the confines of the K12 curriculum utilized by the Idaho Virtual Academy that she'd been enrolled in for grades K-3 and I'd tried to venture into the less formal lands of project-based homeschooling and unit-based homeschooling in grades 4-5, it had proven difficult to achieve the focus and consistency necessary to complete even the modest goals we set. It seemed she was having an incredibly difficult time focusing on anything for any length of time, and abandoned projects cluttered her room and spread out all over the house and even into the yard. I felt her pain, as I'm a squirrel-brained Golden Retriever myself most days, but it was reaching a level of disorganized thinking and action that went way beyond simple immaturity. It was actually getting worse as she got older, not better!

More troubling, her frustrated outbursts any time she couldn't instantly master new material were becoming more frequent and intense. (It reminded me of me doing algebra homework in 8th grade.) She pushed away offers to help like they were offers of cyanide. She interrupted constantly, and argued even minor points as if her life depended on the outcome. There was no filter between her brain and her mouth...if she thought it, she blurted it. I was reactive, and we were engaged in yelling matches far too frequently. I felt like I'd become the mother of a belligerent 16-year old, and I despaired. If it's this bad at age 11, what on earth would 16 look like? And it finally occurred to me, with my husband's input, that our beloved, creative, impulsive, talented, moody, brilliantly inconsistent and inconsistently brilliant girl might actually have Attention Deficit Disorder...along with her mother. It was a case of the blind leading the blind. No wonder we had been struggling to make homeschooling work for so long!

One of my main summer goals (besides trying to relax and enjoy ourselves) was to have both of us evaluated for ADD, and to act on the (probable) diagnosis with medication and behavioral modifications so that she could start out her public school career being the best her she could be and I could perhaps become more the mother I want to be, leaving some of the anger and irritability and chaos behind. We'd already planned to have our youngest daughter evaluated, as after a year in kindergarten it was apparent that she had an incredibly difficult time remaining focused enough to accomplish any work, and her boundary issues from lack of impulse control have begun to affect her social life. A pediatric neurologist she'd seen for an EEG consult in June suggested strongly that we have her evaluated for ADHD, as well. My husband also suffers from ADD, according to online assessment tools, but he has more of an anxiety component. In other words, we're a whole family of squirrel brains, but all with unique issues resulting from the same condition. Since he's dealing with a host of other health issues, we decided not to pursue his diagnosis/treatment at this time.

It was not surprising to confirm through evaluations by the behavioral health specialist that both daughters and myself score very highly in the ADD/ADHD spectrum. All three of us began prescription medication. We've had almost two months now to assess their efficacy, and have had to change medication for both daughters due to unacceptable side effects, but the good news is that my oldest daughter has started to exhibit some amazing ability to maintain focus, and her irritable outbursts are far fewer and less volatile. We are waiting until school starts to try a different medication for my youngest daughter, as the first one affected her normally cheerful personality to a very noticeable degree. She became very oppositional and unhappy. When all three therapists commented on it on the same day,  it confirmed our conviction that it was time to change medication. As for me, I started on a very low dose, and have noticed a mild improvement in my ability to focus, but am going to see about increasing the dosage, as it's awfully subtle. I still struggle mightily to stay focused. (It has taken me four days to write this post.)

We went by the school yesterday to see the classroom lists that were posted at 3 PM. (Not like we were counting the days, hours, and minutes or anything!) My daughter didn't get the teacher we'd requested, but she did get placed in the same class with a friend. That was probably more important, as the teacher is still supposed to be a good, nice teacher, and my daughter was mostly worried about making friends. She's been cleaning her room (usually looks like a tornado hit it), and two days ago spent hours sitting at her desk working on her 4H recordbook...the desk that had been buried under a mound of randomly tossed items for months. She's been researching kid-friendly school lunches that she can pack. The medication definitely seems to be reaping obvious and intended benefits.

Now of course I'm second guessing myself and thinking, "Gee, maybe if she'd been on medication last June I wouldn't have fired her as my student, and I'd be homeschooling my girl next week instead of sending her off to public school. What have I done???" I can't deny that I'm experiencing a sense of loss, and have been trying to fill these last days of summer with lots of quality time together, cognizant that our time together is going to be a much more rare, precious commodity once September 3rd rolls around. We have a salon appointment together on Wednesday, the day before school starts, and I'd like to think of something fun to do afterwards.

But a part of me believes I also need this time to blossom, to have some time to pursue the goals and dreams that weren't possible in the confines of the homeschooling life I was leading, and that she will blossom with new friendships and learning to navigate in the world more independently. Hopefully part of the benefit for her will also be seeing her mom become the writer she'd always dreamed of becoming, of pursuing her dreams and achieving them. I don't want her to grow up with an image of me as her "woulda-shoulda-coulda" mom.

There's a tempest outside as I prepare to post this...wind bursts up to 70 mph, I'd estimate. It matches my inner turmoil about my sense of adequacy as a wife, mother, and human being at this point in my life. I can only hope that when this storm passes, the rains will come and the heavy smoke from raging wildfires that's filled our valley for the past several weeks will be cleansed from our skies and homes, and we'll be able to enjoy the beauty of summer's end instead of hiding out indoors. Hopefully my internal weather forecast will follow suit.

Jeepers, Peepers...

Insomnia strikes again, so here I am at 2:22 AM, all fired up and ready to post!

Today we took our batch of grade-school chicks from the brooder in the garage they've been inhabiting for the past several weeks and added them to the batch of jr. high chicks that were vacated from the same brooder a couple of weeks ago and put in an enclosure fashioned underneath our trampoline as a halfway house. We put them there so our flock of eight free-ranging hens could get to know them through the plastic webbing without being able to peck them to pieces.

It's a bit stressful, wondering if their eventual introduction to the main coop is going to result in avicide; established chicken flocks REALLY don't like newcomers. But there are 14 newcomers, and although five of them are bantams (1 Buff Brahma Bantam, 2 White Silkies---they look like the chicken equivalent of a French poodle---1 Silver Sebright, 1 Golden Sebright), the other nine are various breeds of laying hen (2 Silver-Laced Wyandottes, 1 Black Sex Link, 1 Red Sex Link, 3 Cuckoo Marans, a Buff Orpington, and a Light Brahma.) I sincerely hope the establishment of the pecking order doesn't involve any bloodshed, and that there will be safety in numbers for the newcomers.

The Cuckoo Marans are a French breed that resemble the black-and-white speckled Plymouth Barred Rocks, but they lay deep chocolate brown eggs. Although the spelling is slightly different, I love the idea of us cuckoo Marrans having Cuckoo Marans!

The bantams and Light Brahma we got based on their reputation for being good brooders, so that one or more of them can eventually raise up the next generation of feed store chicks. (While they're cute, the responsibility of doing it ourselves gets old.) Some of them might turn out to be roosters, as they only sell the bantams straight run. We will re-home any roosters, as we want to be good neighbors, and get some sleep ourselves. The robins are bad enough, starting to sing vociferously at 3:49 AM (not that I'm looking at the clock or anything)...I can't imagine listening to roosters joining the fray!

Tonight there was a thunderstorm, with quite a good deluge and some hail to boot. I put a covering over the 1/4 of the trampoline that was directly over their cardboard box shelters and feed, but when I checked on them after dark, the six youngest chicks that were spending their first night outside were bedded down in the grass next to the netting. I reached under the netting and grabbed five of them up and relocated them to their cardboard coop, but the last one scuttled into the center of the enclosure, out of my reach. I squoze through the gap between the netting and the trampoline mat and picked up the chick, which started squawking like it was about to be dinner, and plopped it unceremoniously in the cardboard coop with its compatriots. The only chick bright enough to have taken refuge in the box was the little Light Brahma. What can I say...they originated in India!

I guess I've  become somewhat blase about chickens since we first brought home chicks from the feed store two years ago. Those six girls were very well-documented in photos and videos. I've only taken a couple snapshots of these latest batches. (This year, we even raised seven chicks for my daughter's dance teacher!) I'll have to take some more photos now that they're all mostly feathered out, but here, for the record, is one of our peepers (Silver-Laced Wyandotte.) Good night!

In Gratitude

So I'm leaving the chiropractor this morning after waking up with a horrible case of Franken-neck (apparently my pillow attacked me while I slept), and a developmentally delayed woman gets up from her chair and offers to open the door for me. She expresses concern and wishes me well, and I am grateful.

I stop a few blocks up the street to call home and make sure we have some valerian in stock, as my muscles are spasming something fierce and I can barely force myself to turn my head to the right. I will make a detour to Wal-Mart if we're out. Hubby assures me that we have some.

I am in such pain I'm not sure I can drive 20 minutes home, so I go into Starbucks and get a drink to wash down some Advil and wait a little bit for it to take effect. I have an ice pack plastered to the side of my neck. Even when I had a bad case of rollercoaster neck from a day at Silverwood a few years ago, it was never this bad. I read the paper restlessly, but every few moments suck in my breath when I inadvertently tilt my head slightly in the wrong direction and set off another spasm.

I finally get up to leave, and am faced with what feels like the monumental task of pushing open the heavy glass door without setting my neck off again. I look hopefully at a couple of women standing outside nearby, thinking they might be about to enter, but they're just chatting. I shuffle the door open very gradually and ease myself outside, my neck listing like the Titanic, the ice pack balanced carefully on top of my shoulder.

One of the women notices me starting to move carefully towards my car, and says, "Are you OK?" I laugh and reply, "Is it that obvious?" She says she could tell I was in pain, and offers to take my keys and wallet and open my door for me. She suddenly realizes what she'd said and rushes to reassure me, "I'm not trying to rob you, I promise!" LOL! What a doll!

I grimace right then as another shooting pain flashes through my neck, and she asks me if I want her to pray for me. I say, "Sure! I'll take all the help I can get!" She reaches out and holds my hands, bows her head, then launches into the spontaneous prayer of a woman comfortable chatting with her Creator and asks for His blessings on me that I might get home safely and experience healing. Standing right there on the sidewalk in Clarkston, WA, a little before noon, I experienced the love of a complete stranger, dropping everything to try to help me out because she discerned I was in pain.

As I get in the car she tells me she was born with scoliosis and visits the same chiropractor I'd just seen. I notice the fingers of one of her hands are curled, possibly from mild cerebral palsy, and I surmise that she probably has experienced many health issues in her life. She would make a fabulous nurse. Maybe she is one. I ask her name, and she says it's Jamie. Her last name starts with an "M". She attends Crosspoint periodically. If any of you know her, you're friends with an angel!

Easter Surprises

Easter is all about being surprised. The empty tomb, new life, God's mysteries, life's mysteries.

This year, my husband and I attended the Easter Vigil service for the first time in years. We hired a sitter for the girls, as the hours-long service would extend late into the evening, and we were planning to bring them to the Easter Sunday service the next morning. I love the bonfire outside, the large Easter candle being lit at dusk and the sanctuary gradually filling with light as each parishioner enters with a small candle which has been lit from the master flame, the sanctuary soon aglow with hundreds of dancing lights. The priest intones the prelude to the Mass by candlelight, and as we traverse the scriptures from Genesis to the risen Christ, the lights come on and the choir bursts forth with the long withheld "Alleluia!" New members are baptized and confirmed, the light of Christ and the Holy Spirit glowing afresh in them.

As I observed the proceedings from my place in the choir, I recalled my husband's and my baptism and entry into the Church twelve years ago. Our years of infertility and miscarriage came to an abrupt end shortly thereafter, and our first daughter, who was conceived during the light-filled days following our baptisms, became our own Easter miracle when she was born the following January.

Our second daughter joined our family through adoption three and a half years ago. She brought her own unique light and spirit, a light that was nearly extinguished during her first year of life as a premature baby abandoned at a government hospital in Gulbarga, India. Fed watered-down formula that barely kept her alive, she actually developed marasmus--protein starvation, which results in severe muscle wasting--in the hospital. Three pounds at birth, she weighed only seven pounds at six months of age, and ten pounds at a year. She had by then been transferred to an orphanage in Bangalore that was sponsored by Holt International, where she received the nutrition and therapy to begin to thrive, but she had the developmental level of a two-month old. It was uncertain if she would ever walk or talk, and there were concerns that she would be profoundly mentally disabled.

Now six and a half years old, she is an exuberant force of nature, definitely walking and talking and most definitely NOT profoundly mentally disabled. She does, however, have lingering effects from her hard start in life, loosely defined as developmental delays accompanied by sensory processing disorder and attention deficit disorder. When she came home at age three and a half, she still had the Frankenstein walk of a toddler, and her fine motor skills lacked the refinement to confine her scribbles to the page or reliably steer her utensils to her mouth. Her vocabulary consisted of six words, a few signs, and lots of pointing and babbling. She has made steady progress with the help of physical, occupational, and speech therapists, and can now run around the playground with her kindergarten playmates and speak in mostly understandable short sentences. Yet there is a struggle to control her body and words, an intensity of effort that her classmates don't share. It is at times exhausting for her. Her brain is working so hard. And perhaps that's why it shorted out on Easter Sunday halfway through Mass.

Miss Wiggle-Worm was boinking from lap to lap during the homily, as is her custom. She was sitting on my lap facing me, and after a few minutes decided she wanted to move over to Papa's lap. She had only been there a short time when she suddenly got a distressed look on her face, then stiffened and arched backwards, her eyes simultaneously rolling up in her head. My husband said if she'd been lying on her stomach on the floor she would have been rocking back and forth like a rocking chair. He stood up and alerted me that something was wrong. I took one look and hurried over to our friend who is a nurse, and beckoned her to come. I don't know who first said the word "seizure"; I think it was me, as I'd seen them occur in children before. Our friend concurred, and suggested we take her down to the ER for followup. She was by now conscious again, but was acting groggy and a little irritable. I asked a friend to pack up our instruments and music and other items, then zipped down to the ER.

I have a lot to be thankful for this Easter, as the CT scan they performed showed no sign of a brain tumor as a causative factor. I knew a tumor was a possibility, and it was a relief to rule that out. One seizure does not a "seizure disorder" make, so we were told to follow up with an EEG and possibly an MRI, and were informed that medication wouldn't be considered unless she had a second seizure.

By the time we left the ER, the light was again dancing in our daughter's eyes. She wanted to dye Easter eggs when we got home, as I'd left the eggs and dye sitting out on the counter for when we returned from church. We enjoyed coloring the eggs together with her big sister, and I was grateful that we were enjoying this annual family tradition together so soon after the morning's medical drama. We decided to keep our plans to go to a friend's house for an early Easter dinner, but she grew groggy and fell asleep in the car on the way there. Although she awoke when we arrived, she was so tired she used my husband's folded up flannel shirt as a pillow at the dinner table and didn't eat anything. She fell asleep and slept for a couple of hours, then went to bed shortly after arriving home, logging an impressive 15 hours of sleep altogether. Her little brain was obviously tuckered out.

This Easter will always be memorable; it won't blur together with Easters before or after. I found more meaning in the messages of resurrection, light, and hope than I have on other Easter Sundays. And as I looked into my daughter's eyes as she clutched my husband's arm in the ER, I felt like the mystery of life was no mystery at all: Love as perfectly as you can, as long as you can. And while you do, the light of Easter will be impossible to extinguish.