LIVE - Living In Victory Everyday - supporting @null

^{My daughter Tamsin Living In Victory Everyday. LIVE!}

25 December 1987, on Christmas day, my baby girl was born.

What made this such a memorable day was not only that she was born on Christmas day, the biggest Christmas gift I could have asked for, but she was born Living In Victory Everyday. LIVE!

Meet my daughter Tamsin.

Tamsin was born 5 weeks earlier. Not only was she born earlier but I had a very difficult pregnancy and was in hospital for two weeks prior to her birth. The odds were all against her for living. I sat for hours next to the incubator just watching and praying. I trusted nobody with her.

With each day passing she got stronger and eventually we could take her home. Although it was a glorious day for all of us I was so scared and I wish I could put her back where she came from, living safely in my tummy.

She was so tiny that she slept in a shoe box and she wore doll clothes. I was too scared to bath her and my sister had to come and do it for me.

Slowly but surely she grow into being a normal baby. As tiny as she was she had a voice ten times her size.

Ten months and she was not sitting. Twelve months and still no signs of sitting and not near crawling. We were told that they will have to start forcing her with weights so that she could learn to sit. Two days before the first treatment she sat for the first time all by herself. Fourteen months and she went squint and had her first operation.

While she was recovering from the operation I noticed her fingers was pulling funny,“trigger fingers”, we were told. Back to theater so that they could fix her ligaments.

Two months after that and again back to theater. This time for her toes which were climbing over each other with the result that they had to sew them together.

And that is how her Living In Victory Everyday started. LIVE!

At the age of 9 she started school in the normal school stream much older than her school friends. According to her school rapport she was doing well but as a mom I knew that something was not right.

Because of her lack of crawling she never developed spatial orientation which created big problems for her in primary school. She could write the word “Coke” literally in ten different ways. We could sit with the 2 x table learning it today but tomorrow it will all be gone.

And so we learned a new word “dyslexia”. How I hate this word! There is such a stigma to it which is so wrong!

They wanted to place her in a special school for children who suffered from learning disabilities but I refused.

At the age of fifteen I could not handle her school work anymore. We sat for hours after school every day. I tore pages and pages out of her school books. I even at one stage sat with a knife threatening to cut her fingers off if she use them for counting.

Then one afternoon after we both erupted in tears I just draw the line. I marched her into the principal’s office the next morning and told him that I withdraw. From that day forth Tamsin is in her own. No more homework for me, no more tasks for me and I don’t even want to see her test results.

That was the day that her life turned around.

She had to live by herself for herself and she did!

She passed high school with a distinction and today she is a loving wife and mommy of two beautiful children. I always said I wish I can just take some of her guts and give it to her brother.

She is Living In Victory Everyday by;

• Always being positive
• Always laughing
• Always seeing the good in other people
• Always supporting the underprivileged
• Always lending a helping hand
• Never saying a bad word about someone else
• Never giving up!

How I wish I could live life like her!

This is my second #burnsteem25 post.