Wednesday, December 21st is Ali’s birthday! It’s been two years since that cold snowy night when Ali was born and it’s been two years since we almost lost her to a drug overdose, soon it will be two years since we found out that she has Costello Syndrome.

We have a new normal now, a normal that often doesn’t feel normal at all but for us it is. Ali has come so far in two years, way further than we expected. A lot of children with Costello Syndrome don’t make it to their second birthday, it’s hard to imagine a world without Ali but there were days when that was a real possibility and now she’s a happy, loving little girl with so much to give to the world! I want to shout it from the roof tops that my baby is two, she’s a big girl now! She made it!

The past two years have been years of extremes. I’ve gone from being so worried about test results that the world has started to spin and fade away from me to being so overjoyed by one of Ali’s incredible firsts that all I could do was cry. I know that the worries will remain, I still worry every single day that something may take her from us but I also look forward to the firsts that will come, to the look in her eyes when I grab her from her crib in the morning and to the way it feels when she wraps her arms around me and squeals with delight when I pick her up.

Happy Birthday to the strongest little girl I know. I don’t know what we did to deserve her but she couldn’t be more special to us!