It seems almost unreal to imagine that my daughter is 14 years old and much closer to when she flies away from the nest than she used to be! It seems like it was yesterday that we were taking the most notorious picture of her we’ve ever taken.

It was taken two weeks after she was born and the boys are hovering over her where she’s laying on a pink boppy pillow. Nicholas was fixated on the camera, Alex was fixated on her…and neither of them had a clue that their lives would never be the same again. Or any of our lives, for that matter.

But she knew.

Somehow she knew full well that once she got her foot in the door, God help whoever was on the other side of that door from her. Look at the tiny smile that says so many things that would be years beyond her age.

She knew.

This picture was so well known in the family that all you had to do was mention it’s sequence number from the camera and we knew *EXACTLY* which picture you were talking about. This one is #255. There have been more pictures since then that have had that camera sequence number but none of them come close to just how meaningful this one is.

By the time Katie joined us, Alex had already had two brain surgeries and was in various forms of therapy and consumed a lot of the attention there was to give.

And yet from the beginning, Katie has always been there for Alex. She was the one who would want to help with his care or play with him. Even today, she’s the one who usually doles out his daily medicine (of which there are *MANY* for both morning and bedtime) and keeps track of any changes. She knows what he can have and what he can’t for that ketogenic diet he’s on which has dramatically improved his quality of life.

Through the years she’s quietly taken care of her schoolwork, often on her own because we were being run ragged trying to keep up with Nicholas’ or Alex’s needs for school and otherwise. And she’s done very well at it even with her own challenges to conquer. Honestly, her eighth grade year achievements were all her own even with the COVID-19 throwing the last three months into chaos. She’s the one we generally don’t have to worry about in terms of attending her classes and doing her work.

And along the way she has managed to turn her attention toward playing football or learning Tae Kwon Do or gymnastics and especially her time doing the dances she loves to do particularly with her friends from the old Purple Troupe.

And no matter what she turns her hand to, she does well with it in spite of all of the madness of schools or schedules or activities that surround her.

That’s the thing you’ll learn about Katie if you spend any amount of time with her. She has far more strength and grace than most people are aware of because she tends to be the one that just gets on with doing what needs to be done for whoever may need it.

But it’s her heart and her sense of loyalty and fair play and desire to see things put right that makes her really special.

We were at a dance competition where one girl got singled out with the lowest possible rating for her dance. We hadn’t been doing the troupe competitions for very long at that point but that bothered Katie so much that she wanted to go to that girl and give her a hug and tell her that her dance was truly beautiful. And it was a beautiful dance. I won’t claim to be an expert at judging dance but as a former football referee, I can usually tell when a harsh decision has been handed down. But Katie felt truly bad for that girl…a girl at a completely different dance studio that she’d never met before and may never meet again. But Katie is well acquainted with people who are hurting and in pain and she’s often the first one jumping in to try to make them feel right again.

A few years earlier, she was on a football team in a church league that was evenly split between boys and girls. It didn’t take long for the boys to hog the ball and not pass the ball to the girls and even less time for her to notice it. She made a point of showing them that the girls were just as capable of dribbling and scoring goals as the boys. They may not necessarily have been as fast as the boys but in terms of their head for the game, the girls were a lot more strategic and effective because they’d work cooperatively together without so much of the egos getting in the way. The boys eventually took the hint and started letting the girls play…and the team was pretty much unstoppable at that point.

That’s Katie in a nutshell. Put an obstacle in her path and she will walk round it as if it does not exist. And she’ll usually do so with a sense of grace that will leave you speechless when you see it.

She’s the irresistible force *AND* the immovable object. And God help the person on the other side of the door when she marches through because she will do so with style, a smile, and those big blue eyes that no mere mortal can resist.

She’s starting her ninth grade at Enloe this year and their mascot is the eagle. I have no doubts in my mind that she will soar above the clouds as the eagles are wont to do.

She doesn’t know any other way!

Happy birthday, baby girl. I love you and I’m so proud of you in ways you can’t possibly imagine and can’t wait to see what’s coming next! 🙂