Every Mother’s Day we go to the zoo.  So this morning, I spontaneously said, “Hey, lets go to the zoo quick before it’s too sunny for Maura to be outside.”  Mornings are a hard time for Maura – she’s tired and sore and usually likes to sit and do art while she gets ready to be awake and move.  But she was a trooper and we had a little bit of fun before she said she was ready to go home.  I spent the day thinking about how different things are now.  I never imagined I’d find myself celebrating things like – today my nearly four-year-old walked off a curb unassisted and even though we weren’t allowed to make a big deal out of it, the look of pride in her eyes was visible.  Or to be excited as I see her struggle to move her legs around in front of her so she can go down the slide at the park.  Or that she’d look at me at after crawling up the stairs and say excitedly, “Mommy, I didn’t know I could do that!”  But I have to remind myself daily that even though four months ago this was not my normal, it is my normal now AND there are so many families out there that have struggles, no matter the difficulty, they do struggle and I am grateful that where we are now is in a spot of moving forward.  The fact that she is going through all of this and still has herself and her personality means the world to me.  We are truly so lucky and grateful.  So whatever the old normal was, what I have to always remember is that tonight when she was playing with Talking Tom Cat on my iPad she had him say, “I love my mommy, she is the best.” I’m beyond happy with that as my new normal.