Submitted 4/18/02 by Ben
Baby Sister
I remember when Emmeline was born. The memories aren't vivid or coherent, but they are there nonetheless. The night she was born, us kids had already gone to bed for the night. Dad came into our rooms and woke us up, "Would you like to meet your new baby sister?"
We went into Mom and Dad's bedroom to take a look. Sure enough, there was our beautiful new sister. Dad took me into the bathroom and told me to look in the sink. There was this gross blob of blood and tissue.
"Yuck!" I said.
"That's the placenta," he told me.
We went back to bed. Everything was right with the world. for a little while. It wasn't long before we could tell that there was something special about Emmeline. I remember that Mom and Dad started looking sad all of the time and talking funny to us. One day Mom and Dad rushed away and Megan, Kendra, and I were whisked off to Grandma Rue's house. We liked going to Grandma's house, but we could tell that this wasn't a normal visit.
Mom and Dad finally came back and they still had baby Emmeline. "Your sister has CF," they told us. We didn't know what that meant, but we could tell that things were going to be different.
I remember always having a humidifier on. Mom would lay Emmy across her lap and beat on her chest for forever it seemed. They went to the doctor a lot. Emmy had to eat these little white bb's in her cereal and lots of other weird things, but aside from all that she was just our baby sister and we loved her.