Mommy Proof #1: When your child overcomes any setback, you begin to feel like you can succeed at anything....

A little more than five years ago, I was two days overdue and wondered if this child would ever evacuate my uterus. What could I expect? What is IUGR anyway? Google it. You will see the dreaded school yard word that makes you shudder to your very core. "RETARD." Well, intrauterine growth retardation to be exact. You have never heard of it? Neither did I.

Intrauterine growth retardation is a big, fancy way of saying that your baby is not growing properly in utero. The reason could be almost anything. Inadequate placenta? Maybe. I remember thinking even my placenta is inadequate. What is going to be the effect on the baby? Will he ever grow properly? If his body didn't grow properly, what about his lungs, organs, heart? What about his brain? What will he be able to do? What if he isn't able to do anything? How will I cope? Will my marriage survive? How will our family survive? What if?

Forty weeks. That's how long it takes to grow a human baby. Forty weeks and two days, that is two days extra. Forty weeks and two days is how long I was pregnant before I was induced. Forty weeks and two days is how long I waited to have my third child, my first son. Forty weeks and two days for an IUGR baby equaled four pounds, thirteen ounces and seventeen and a half inches long. He was so tiny and so fragile. It made me wonder. If his body didn't develop properly, what else didn't?

We saw differences between our older children and Jax early on. He didn't crawl as early as they did. He was content to just be, sitting for hours at a time. He was active, but not as active. I could cuddle him for hours without him ever fighting to pull away, to get down, to just be. The girls were the pictures of health compared to him. I spent countless hours in the pediatricians' office, specialists' waiting rooms, and emergency rooms. I waited for doctors, nurses, x-ray technicians to complete test after test. It was always the same thing. He would recover. He would be fine. Ten days later, there would be another round of antibiotics, steroids, and doctor visits. Eventually, they figured out that he was allergic to any and everything airborne. He was asthmatic. He had fluid around his ear drum that impaired his speech. After surgery to remove his enlarged tonsils and adenoids and put tubes into his ears, he was a different child.

My little boy could hear. He began to speak. He could run without stopping to cough and catch his breath, but something was not quite right. His speech was not on par with what I was used to with his sisters. He stopped progressing with using new words. By age three, I was convinced that something was not connecting. He didn't know his colors. He couldn't remember his shapes. He couldn't copy a straight line. He had great difficulty copying or tracing a shape. He had a hard time remembering what letter, color, number, or shape we went over incessantly that day. We had him in speech therapy. We mentioned it to his pediatrician and therapist. We saw the frustration in his face when he couldn't remember the name of the color, letter, shape, or number we went over ten minutes before. These were all things that his sisters knew by an earlier age.

It wasn't until he was almost four that I began to wonder how this would effect his life. Yes, he would learn to spell his name. He would learn to write it eventually, but how would this effect his self-esteem and confidence? How would his delay effect his ability to connect with his peers? I decorated his room with an Alphabet comforter, hoping that he would dream of the letters after we went over them. My nephew donated his collection of 300 cars. We would count them, group them by colors, make shapes with them. My other children were not eligible to attend pre-K classes. It wasn't needed. Jax was in the room for five seconds before I realized that not only would he be accepted, he would actually need it. Desperately. I worked with him to no avail during the summer with phonics, number and letter recognition, shapes and colors. The first time he said the color blue when he picked a blue block, I teared up. When he recognized his name on the Wii, I cried.

Five long years later, he wrote his name for the first time. Painstakingly exact with every stroke his marker made. Two years after his sisters first did it. One year after he learned to spell it. He did it. An hour later, I put my feelings of triumph into words. My name is Jenn and it's nice to meet you.