Getting to Know Me

 Back to the blog and already excited that week two is coming to a close!  If the weeks continue to move this quick, we will be through the program in no time!  Here are a couple photos of me:

This is a picture of me and my family as a child.  I have two younger sisters (twins - on the left).  In the middle is my daddy,  one my #2 favorite person in the world.  These are the people who made me who I am today!

Here is a more recent photo of my with my actual favorite person in the whole world (sorry Daddy!).  Josh and I have been married for a little over a year and a half.  We met in high school, started dating long distance in college, and were married a year after we graduated.  He's my biggest supported and my solid rock.  No picture of me is complete without him!

For the second part of this post, I want to tell a quick story.  I so badly wanted to include this story in this week's assignment about passion, but with all the other information we had to cover, I was worried that I wouldn't do it justice.

At my center, we had a sweet little girl named Allie that I worked with in the infant room.  She was there when I started working there (she was 7 months).  Her dad, I found out quickly, had had a horrible form of brain cancer and was in recovery.  Not long after I had started at the center, he found out that he had had a relapse and from the beginning, the prognosis wasn't good.  To make a horrible story short, he lost his battle to the cancer when Allie was only 16 months old.  Our hearts were so broken for her and her mother.  At the visitation, I had a short moment to talk to Allie's mom, and she told me this sweet story.

One of the things that had been meaningful to her of my time with her daughter was that I always blew her kisses when I saw her and when she left at the end of the day.  Her mom credited me with teaching Allie to blow kisses in return.  The morning after her husband's death, Allie's mom was searching for a way to explain to her young daughter why she couldn't find her daddy.  She told me that she wound up explaining to Allie that while her daddy wasn't there, she could always blow kisses into her hand for him.  Her mom, in the middle of this emotional visitation, thanked me for teaching this sweet little girl how to blow kisses.  Allie's mom has since made other child care arrangements for her, but I still think about her and her family often.

This was one of those moments for me where I so tangibly got a glimpse of how important our work in early childhood can be.  We are giving these sweet babies the tools they need to communicate with and understand this big, scary, beautiful world we live in.  We may never know how significant the small skills we teach our kids are, but we can be comforted to know that we are absolutely making a difference.

Thanks for reading!