1.25 Courage - Keep on Keepin' on

Bestest Friend and I are embarking on a new blog project. Each day of the month we will post a picture on a pre-determined theme and write a little something about it. The theme for the twenty-fifth day of each month is "Courage."
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My five-year old niece has cerebral palsy. She uses a walker to get around and attends physical and occupational therapy weekly and gets Botox injections four times a year. But this isn’t about her. She is not courageous – she is living her life the only way she knows.

But it’s about her parents, my sister- and brother-in-law, who take her to those appointments, who deal with the daily worries about how to make accommodations so she can do the same things her twin brother can do, who spend hours on the phone with insurance companies and doctors’ offices, who somehow both maintain full-time jobs, in addition to caring for their two other children.  This is about her parents, who know that life will not be as easy for their little girl as it will be for a lot of kids, but don’t let her off the hook from doing what the other children do, even if it is harder for her. This is about her parents, who took a look at options for schools for their daughter, and moved to a different district so that she could start kindergarten in a school that would be the best fit for her. 

Theirs is an everyday courage. They aren’t going to make the newspaper for their feats of bravery, they aren’t going to go viral with pictures of them at PT doing the same exercise a million times in a row, and they aren’t going to win national awards for their patient parenting.  But they should.  

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To see what Bestest Friend wrote about the theme of the day, check out her blog, Too Legit To Quit.