You know me as Kit, but that is my nickname. My name is really Katherine Durning Moore and I was named after my father’s grandmother, or my great-grandmother. Like me, everyone called her Kit.

I’m a twin. Twins don’t run in our family, and my parents were surprised when they discovered that they were having two babies instead of one. Jack is my fraternal, or non-identical, twin. We were born on Tuesday, August 30, 2005, the day Hurricane Katrina dissipated over Mississippi. I’m two minutes older than Jack.

I have an older brother named Archie who just turned six-years-old last week. I love him very much.

I have twenty cousins, but I’m the only girl cousin on my mother’s side of the family. This means that I’ll always be my Nana and Mic’s only granddaughter. My godparents, my mother’s brother and his wife, just had their third baby this past weekend on Halloween morning. My uncle and aunt named the baby Cael, but Mom says she’s just going to call him Boo.

Sometimes I introduce myself as “Kit the Princess.”

I also think of myself as an artist and will occasionally say so when I meet new people.

Our family has a dog, named Jinx. The veterinarian says she’s a pure-bread Belgian sheepdog, but my mother didn’t know that when she rescued Jinx from the pound. Jinx sleeps on the floor near my bed at night.

Like all parents, I spent a significant portion of my son’s birthday marking his progress over the years, noting how far he’s come and how much he’s grown. But unlike many parents, I quantified that progress in fits and starts, assigning responsibility to doctors, to therapists, to teachers more so than I could claim it as my own.

When I was pregnant with my son Archie, my husband and I discovered during a routine ultrasound that our baby had a severe congenital heart defect that would need to be corrected by way of open-heart surgery after the baby was born, when he was still an infant. Further prenatal testing confirmed that Archie also had Down syndrome, a genetic condition associated with the impairment of cognitive ability and physical growth. Although we were daunted by this diagnosis, my husband and I were also determined to remain enthusiastic about our baby’s arrival.

I learned about the Meyer Center for Special Children, a preschool that offers developmental education and therapy services to children with disabilities, before Archie was born. I was so encouraged by the information I ascertained from the Center, from other parents who had enrolled their own children there, that I was convinced this baby of mine would also benefit greatly from the Center’s program. I resolved I’d enroll him there as soon as he was old enough to regularly attend classes.

But when Archie was born he was much sicker than his diagnosis indicated he may be. He spent weeks in our city’s children’s hospital before he was transferred to the state’s medical university. There he endured the surgery to correct his malformed heart, and Archie’s health finally improved enough that my husband and I were allowed to bring our baby home.

At home Archie received intervention services from therapists who visited our house every other week, but those therapists regularly cancelled appointments and some of them seemed untrained to work with my small son. I worried that these inferior services, combined with Archie’s tumultuous beginning, would leave my son hopelessly behind his peers.

As soon as Archie received permission from his doctors to attend classes, my husband and I enrolled him at the Meyer Center. We were unabashedly excited to send our son to school, to a place where we were sure Archie would begin to meet developmental milestones. But that enthusiasm was tempered when we realized that the student the teachers and therapists were getting to know wasn’t at all like the boy we knew at home. Archie always cried when I left him at school, and the teaching staff’s assessments of Archie were an inadequate representation of his skills.

Not long after he began school at the Meyer Center, Archie was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. He spent months in a bed in the hospital, tethered to tubes and wires. Concerns about Archie’s development gave way to concerns about his health. It was difficult to remember when our life wasn’t defined by treatments or conferences with doctors. I worried that the world outside the hospital had forgotten about us so it always pleased me when Archie’s teachers and therapists from the Meyer Center stopped by his hospital room to visit, or when members of the Center’s administration left messages of encouragement on our home answering machine.

When Archie returned to class after he’d finished treatment, he couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk and could barely feed himself. His hair was only beginning to grow back, and each sneeze and cough was still a source of concern. But still I trusted the Meyer Center staff with my child and knew that their concern for his wellbeing mirrored my own. They’d invest their time and talent in my son, I was sure, and his growth would be our reward.

It has been four years since Archie returned to class at the Meyer Center. Today he runs more often than he walks, he speaks in complete sentences, and last week he was able to feed himself a piece of his birthday cake. He’s beginning to read, too, and each time Archie cracks open a new book my heart opens wide as well and love, pride and humility seep out into all the open places.