In Our Midst
MEET THE FAMILY FEATURED IN THE FILM:
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From the left, above, are parents Bob and Karen in a rare quiet moment together; 12-year-old Alex doing homework. Below: 11-year-old Andrew playing with Legos; and 9-year-old Allison, who has joined 6-year-old Aiden as he works at the kitchen table on an art project with his mother's help.
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SOME EXCERPTS FROM THE FILM:
Karen: "Alex had a lot of lung problems, but he was our first one in the nursery and he was, we thought, so, so sick, but he really wasn't in light of everything else. But we were more afraid. Then when Andrew came along, he had a lot of metabolic trouble, holding his different levels of sodium and things like that. . . . He was on oxygen a lot longer. He seemed more sick than Alex had, so we were afraid again. But then when Allison came, she had so many more problems. Every time was a little more traumatic. . . . I didn't see Aiden, meet Aiden, until he was 11 months old. That's when he came to live with us. He was very, very sick, and very tiny at that time. At 11 months old, he weighed about seven and a half pounds. He had a broken femur. So he came to us in a cast that was on both legs and up to his waist. The state just kept saying, 'We don't have anywhere else to go, we don't have anywhere else to go.' We went to court and adopted him."
Karen: "Academic learning is very difficult for Allison, and she's not really progressing by school standards really at all. She's having a terrible time making any connections in math, a terrible time reading. She's not getting any, barely any, sight words, and they're the same words she's been doing for the last couple of years. It's almost depressing because, as much as we see her growth at home in the things that she does, when you go into school she is compared against typical second graders. She's in an inclusion class and you can't help but walk away feeling a little depressed. . . . As much as we feel that we accept her, there's always that looming around, what she could . . . have been doing if she hadn't had a brain hemorrhage."