It's been one year since my hardest day as a mom!  Now it seems like when both my girls are having tantrum or whiny days that those are the hardest days haha But I ran to the beach that day to feel close to Heavenly Father.  Now that we live near the beach its been so fun for me to be at the beach again with my older, thriving baby. We'll walk along the shore together and she's squealing and playing in the ocean. Her vision is not perfect. It is so so much better than I thought it would have been and I'm grateful for the lightening of our load in that area.  Sometimes when I look back at my old posts and I was in such an emotional spot I wish I wouldn't have posted. haha Because most of my days were and are not consumed with the sadness of what our girls go through.

I was talking to a couple friends a while ago and one of them was saying how she didn't know if she could handle having a child with autism or a really hard disability and she said "Like Ali, I don't know how you have dealt with all of this." And as I responded I sort of had an epiphany. I said something like "Capri is doing so awesome and it has been a lot better than we thought.  She has exceeding so many of our expectations.  But I feel like Heavenly Father gave us exactly what we could handle.  Like not one more notch above what we could deal with." Ive heard the phrase "God only gives you what you can handle". And that has been repeated for my entire life. But until I said it out loud about my own personal experiences I didn't really get it.  Most of the kids with Pallister-Hall syndrome or Leber's have extensive every day struggles. And I do not feel lucky there have been moments in her life and diagnosis that have been excruciating.  I don't use that word lightly.  I have sobbed at her bedside and tossed and turned about our purpose with having these angel babies.  It has felt overwhelming.  But having a year of retrospect under my belt has given me clarity.  It has helped me see again that God knows me.  He has allowed challenges to come into my life that push me to develop.  I read a quote from Henry B. Eyring the other day that said "God is not so much concerned just about our comfort but even more about our upward progress." That says everything to me.  Pain and suffering is so important to being on earth.  I was in the temple with one of my friends who was going through a hard time in her life and we were talking about why we had to do go through these hard things and I pointed out how we were in the temple looking for answers.  All this really hard stuff we were going through brought us to where we were at in that very moment.