Mighty Beautiful Heart

Recently, Alexandra taught me a great lesson on patience and persistence that I wanted to share.  For her last surgery, I put together a small plastic photo album containing pictures of the most important people in her life so that she could “see” everyone during what turned out to be a month-long stay in the hospital hours away from our family and friends.  Also, after hearing of issues other children have had after this surgery, I wanted to make sure she recognized and remembered all of these people!  She still likes to look through it and points out each person in each picture every time she looks through it.

Well the other night, while I was busy in the other room, she decided it would be fun to take out every picture and throw them all on the floor of her bedroom.  When I saw the mess, I told her she needed to pick them up.  Little did I know that she would lay down on her stomach and actually put each one back into the photo album.  She wouldn’t even let me help, so I just sat there and watched her for the next 30-40 minutes painstakingly put each picture back into its sleeve.  The pages are flimsy, and she would get one corner of one picture in and as she would try to get the second corner in, the first corner would slip out.  At times she would get one in only to realize that she got it behind the divider and would have to pull it out and start over.  I marveled at how calmly she just kept trying until she got all the pictures back into the photo album. 

It made me think about how quickly we all quit things when they turn out to be harder than we anticipated.  We give up on our dreams when it takes longer than we want to wait.  We never know how close we are to reaching our goals because we give up a moment too soon.  I’ve certainly been as guilty of doing this as the next person!  However, I’m making a plan to take a lesson from my three-year old and persevere through whatever challenges are thrown my way until I’ve done what I want to do!

As you may have noticed, I have taken a bit of a hiatus over the last couple of months getting used to working outside the home again.  For the last few years, I was able to work from home in our own business, which was a true blessing given how much we had to go through with Alexandra.  (At times, just getting her to all of her doctor’s appointments seemed like a full time job not to mention being away for weeks up to a month for surgeries!)  However, for a number of reasons, I decided to look for employment and was lucky to have found a great place which allows me to experience all that I was missing by working at home but still allows me enough flexibility to spend time with my family and continue working in the business.

As I’m sure many other mothers would agree, going back to work was not the hard part.  Finding someone I trusted to care for Alexandra, however, was!  We are fortunate enough to have mothers in the area who take care of her two days a week, but we had a real dilemma as to what to do the other three days.  With the big H1N1 scare back in the Fall and in consultation with all of her doctors, we decided we really needed to have someone come to the house.  We spent months looking for someone and found a terrific young woman to cover for a few weeks when I first started my job.  We kept searching, knowing that she would be going back to school.   Finally, we found someone who shows up on time each day, and Alexandra seems to really like her.  Still, we wonder if we made the right decision.  I guess you’re never 100% sure.

Alexandra is certainly ready for preschool which brings us to our next hurdle…finding the right environment for her and deciding when to start.  Over the next couple of months, we will be looking at options and deciding what’s best for her.

I would love to hear what other Moms have done and how they selected the best care for their children!