Memories

Today's gift is memories!

Early this morning before camp my daughter was sitting on the couch with her friend (who is a fellow camper) and they were flipping through an old photo album of pictures of her before her diagnosis.  She LOVES to look at pictures and she NEVER forgets a face!

She was flipping through the pages so fast acting like she was on a mission....and she was!  She was trying to find a good friend of our's to point him out to her friend.  And she did!  If you ask her to point to a particular person she will...even if it has been YEARS since she has seen them.  It truly amazes me!

I love looking at all pictures with her to reflect on her life.....when she was born....what she was like before Rett Syndrome started to rear its ugly head.....what she could or could not do anymore because Rett Syndrome was present full time... how far we have come since her diagnosis....and everything good and bad in between!

I will be honest,  I do get sad when I look at pictures of her before Rett Syndrome entered our lives....I see a little girl who could do so much and I just think about what that same little girl could be doing now if the Rett Monster never showed up.  Some of my favorites pictures of her are.... eating an ice cream cone and a holding it ALL BY HERSELF....pushing her baby stroller around the house, while both arms were loaded up to her shoulders with bags (we used to call her the bag lady!)....walking down to the beach holding the hand of our dear friends son who is only 6 weeks older than our daughter....walking around swinging her arms back and forth like she owns the place....climbing in and out of her dolls crib....walking up AND down the stairs independently....playing just like nothing in the world was wrong.....

While seeing these makes me sad, they also make me incredibly happy....happy because I was able to enjoy so much of her true toddler years with her before her regression period.  Happy because I know she was happy.  Happy because I can hold onto these memories FOREVER and not even the RETT MONSTER can take them away.

Now we create new memories daily together and as a family.  We actually started a memory jar (thanks to Pinterest!!!) where anytime we have a favorable memory we write it down on a piece of paper and place it in the jar.  On New Year's Day we will read all our memories that we shared together the past year!  It is FULL now, I can only imagine what it will be like in December!

Seeing the smile on her face when she flips through photo albums or her yearbook** (please see side note at the end of the blog) makes me so excited and happy for her.  I know when I see a smile on her face that she remembers those moments just like I do and this feeling of reassurance from her is priceless!

Thank you for all the memories we have shared and all that are to come!

**I wanted to share a wonderful idea my husband had two years ago with you.  We now order our daughter 2 yearbooks...one she gets signed by all her friends and we save and the other we let her flip through constantly!  If she rips a page, we tape it up.  Who cares!  She loves finding her friends and seeing herself too!  Thanks honey for thinking of this wonderful idea for our daughter two years ago as we all know she loves to go down memory lane!**

Here are two quotes for today....

A life-long blessing for children is to fill them with warm memories of times together.  Happy memories become treasures in the heart to pull out on the tough days of adulthood- Charlotte Davis Kasl

We do not remember days, we remember moments- Cesare Pavese