A few posts ago, my fifteen-year-old daughter Bard suggested that I do specialized posts for each of my kids, and I thought that was a pretty good idea. I did one for The Baby (who is growing out of her name WAY too quickly), and now it's time to do one or Sweetheart.
Sweetheart comes by her blog name honestly; she truly is a sweetheart. Yeah, sure, every kid has their faults, and Sweetheart is no exception, but she means well, and even when she doesn't, she never intends to hurt a soul.
My darling second daughter was quite a surprise to me. I wasn't interested in having another baby for all the wrong reasons--weight, personal freedom, selfishness, fear of being a horrible parent, fear of what others would think about us having ANOTHER baby--so when I found out that I was pregnant with Sweetheart, I was devastated. While I'm always open to new life and am pro-life across the board, I felt that I was somehow being challenged, tested, or, maybe, even punished. I'd had a very difficult pregnancy with my third child, Monet, and the labor was emotionally exhausting. I wasn't ready to face any of those issues again, and I wasn't ready to hit the reset button on the baby game.
But there I was, pregnant and pouty, horribly afraid I'd have another boy (because I wasn't doing very well raising boys) and feeling fairly well isolated from--well, from just about everyone.
But when Sweetheart was born--oh, my. She wedged her sweet little self right into my heart, even from the first look at her tiny face, when I knew she was a girl before I had looked at the other end. It was those rosebud lips, I said. I knew she was a girl from those gorgeous rosebud lips!
Sweetheart loves to dance. As a toddler, she could regularly be seen dancing with her older brother, Houdin, twirling around with a binky in her mouth and a kitten in her arms. She constantly insisted on showing me her dance moves, and I would watch as she'd dip and sway and wiggle and hop.
But one morning, Sweetheart didn't feel like dancing. She was complaining of pain in her knee, so I rolled up her little leggings and looked. It was swollen to twice its normal size, and she couldn't bend or extend her leg without great pain. I immediately thought it was a bite of some kind, a spider or something, since we'd recently been spending most of our time living in a cabin in the woods. But after a couple of days, the swelling increased and the pain sharpened to the point that we were carrying her around whereever she needed to go.
So, off to the doctor we went, who referred us to a bone specialist, who agreed to draw fluid from her leg right there in his office instead of having her x-rayed and anesthetized. While Sweetheart wailed, this saint of a doc drew a huge vial of clear liquid from her knee and blood from her little two-year-old arms, and then she and I were left alone while he went off to finish his paperwork. Upon his return, he told me that he didn't think it was cancer, found no evidence of tumors, and as referring me to a specialist; he believed that Sweetheart had JRA, Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis.
On Sweetheart's third birthday, she was indeed diagnosed with JRA. I was so afraid, so confused, and feeling very pressured by the JRA specialist to do many things that I felt were invasive and possibly damaging: steroid injections, a battery of low-dose chemotherapy drugs, and a full course of immunizations (which he insisted upon before he would further treat her, knowing that I vaccinate only for tetanus; turned out he was the head of infectious diseases in his hospital). We opted for physical, dietary and natural treatments. And a lot of prayer.
During that time, our family was attending a Bible Study group where we regularly prayed for one another. We shared with this group our struggles with Sweetheart and her health, telling them how this disease, especially her particular type, could leave her with damaged vision, further joint issues, and even blindness. The part that bothered me the most, I said, was watching her walk, each step painful and burning, especially in the morning or when she had been too inactive. And I shared how difficult it was for me to hear the song "I Hope You Dance," which was very popular during that time. These people, whose names I would be hard-pressed to remember now, gathered around us in prayer, and while I have to admit that I'm not a person who has ever fully believed in miraculous healing, I believed with all my heart that Sweetheart could be healed, that she had been healed, that I could extend a hope for her to dance.
That weekend, the swelling in her knee went down, and her physical therapy teacher tranferred to a different location, leaving us with the decision to either use a different therapist or continue our therapy at home. We decided to choose the home option. We bought her a tricycle and gave her regular warm baths, followed by a routine of "bend and stretch" exercises that everyone in the family helped her perform.
And before the week was out, her little legs were carrying her around again, twirling and dancing and leaping, albeit still slightly painfully.
She rarely has a problem now. Occasionally, she'll awaken with a stiff knee, but only in that one joint, and never so that it's debilatating.
And she still carries kittens around in her arms, and she still has beautiful rosebud lips and, thank God and all that is Good and Right, she still spins around with her older brother, insisting that I watch all of her dance moves.
I'm so very blessed, and I'm thankful that God is so patient with ignorant, selfish, impatient me. I can't imagine my life without Sweetheart. I can't believe I ever existed without her. My life is so much richer watching her marvel over butterflies and caterpillars, cutting flowers from our butterfly garden, cuddling the kittens, singing while she tidies up, dressing in as many outfits as
she can in one day, having tea parties, pretending she's a princess, singing and dancing with The Baby, and, as of two weeks ago, learning to play piano. She loves the color pink, wants to grow her hair really long, insists on wearing dresses every day, adores jewelry, would own all of the Barbies in the world (if her mother would buy them), gathers leaves and writes her name on them with permanent marker, loves to draw and paint and work with clay, and works very hard on her lessons every day. She's learning to read and write and rarely complains about getting her jobs done. Her big brother Monet is her best pal, and she carries her special bear with her just about everywhere she goes. She loves to pick tomatoes from the garden and spoils the bunnies by feeding them carrots every day.To think I didn't want another baby. Harumph. What was I thinking?
But I know better now.
Everyone should have a Sweetheart in their life.
