Watching my daughter bonk her noggin – HARD – on the floor, promptly scream her head off, and quickly return to shredding an old issue of Sports Illustrated (because, really, what else do you do with those?), I am reminded of how blessed we are to have her here.

Almost a year ago, she was born 4 weeks early with an incredibly rare neural tube defect (an encephalocele), but if you saw her today, you would have no idea.

I don’t think a year ago my husband and I could have imagined that our biggest worry today would be what we are having for lunch (pathetic, I know).  Sure, we have bigger concerns, but today, we aren’t worried about them.  Today, we aren't worried about her health.  We aren’t wondering when she will crawl.  We aren’t wondering when she will talk, or if she will have problems that we have not imagined.

Today, we are looking at her and smiling, because it was not supposed to be this good.  Today, we are happy because she wants to shred an old magazine.

This could have been a crappy day.  When we woke up this morning, it was snowing.  Did you know that today is the first day of spring?  I think we have pissed off Mother Nature.   When the snow turned to rain, things started to look pretty gloomy.

But then my daughter bumped her noggin.  And after she stopped messing with the magazine, she shot me the goofiest, most glorious smile that I have ever seen.  I thought my heart was going to burst with happiness.  She is here, and she is awesome.

I guess that is why later today I found myself walking down the street, twirling my umbrella like a 5 year old.  I think the woman I passed thought that I was crazy, and on any other day, she would probably be right.  But today, today I was twirling because I was happy.

She is screaming again because she was just told that she can’t eat the Sports Illustrated.

Now she is trying to feed it to the dog.

I am still happy.