Gracie is doing amazingly well lately. In fact, she’s thriving. She is doing great at school, she is learning to write and draw (she drew her first-ever stick figure family the other day), and she is getting stronger and stronger. This may be the healthiest she’s ever been in her whole life—or at least it’s the healthiest she’s been in a very long time.

One of her cutest newly-discovered talents is jumping. She is getting really good at it, and her favorite jumping venues are puddles. We find every puddle in the parking lot on the way in to school, and she gears up and jumps. And jumps. And jumps and jumps and jumps. She LOVES puddle jumping.

I probably shouldn’t encourage her to jump in puddles, but it’s just so amazing. It was only a little more than a year ago that she really started to walk, and now she can JUMP! She does such a great job, too—she has great body position and lands really well without twisting her ankles. I’m so proud of her. It makes my heart swell every time—jumping is not an easy thing to learn for someone who doesn’t feel her feet, and each jump is a reminder that she once again defied medical logic and learned how to do an impossible task.

For Gracie, no gross motor feat is to be taken for granted, not even a childhood staple like puddle jumping, and each time she does it it’s amazing. So much is uncertain for Grace, and thinking about her future can be very scary indeed. But watching this kid defy the odds over and over again is the surest sign of all that things will be okay for her. She will overcome any obstacle. She may lose her sight, she may have devastating infections, but she will get through it because she is amazing. My sweet Amazing Gracie, puddle jumper extraordinaire.