Thank you to everyone who placed qualifying orders in December!

It’s no exaggeration that life can change in the blink of a moment. When it does, nothing is ever the same again and you will forever be able to remember that very moment.

For me, life changed shortly after I was discharged from the Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda with our newborn and seemingly healthy baby boy. I was at our home in Alexandria and Jack had run to the store to pickup some groceries. Maxi was asleep in bed and I had just sat down when I heard Benni who had started to cry. As I was checking in on him, he stiffened up, turned dark red and it was at that moment that I knew something was very wrong.

Not sure what was going on, I called out to Jack who was just coming in the door. When he saw Benni stiffen up again, he didn’t hesitate but immediately put him into the baby seat and headed for the nearby hospital where he arrived just a few minutes later with Benni who had stopped breathing by the time they walked in.

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After that fateful night in May of 2000 nothing was ever quite the same again. Coping with the aftermath became part of our daily lives.

Don’t get me wrong. We are all very grateful. Grateful that we didn’t wait any longer to take him in. Grateful for the excellent medical care he received. Grateful that we had the financial means to get him into any therapy or treatment that we thought would be helpful. Grateful that we had the opportunity to homeschool him.

There is more but while we experienced lots of gratitude, we also went through incredible amounts of stress. Caused by dozens of ER visits like the day when he stuck his finger into the running blender to see if his finger could stop the blade and his blood sprayed all over our dining room walls or when he rammed a four pronged tiller through his foot and his blood was literally running down the sidewalk. Then there was the time in Germany when he cut through the orange and his finger or the time at a Miami hotel when he found Maxi’s razor and shaved part of his thumb off. The time when he jumped into the pool without his swimming instructor noticing and almost drowned. The list seems endless. Every year on his birthday, I quietly but sincerely gave thanks for having been able to keep him alive for another year.

The years of sleepless nights probably didn’t help, either. His developmental pediatrician thought ADHD meds would help him with his focus after they observed him starting sixteen different activities within five minutes. We did our best and over the years tried every medication the doctors could think of. None of them helped much but all had side effects – some worse than others – often causing him to be wide awake at night and wanting to play.

Then came his fascination with fire alarms. Benni had the uncanny ability to spot them no matter where. He pulled them in a German department store. My Mom and I who each had one of his hands in ours to avoid just that still swear we only let go for a minute! He also pulled one as we were checking out of a hotel in Florida and was delighted when he saw the fire trucks pull in minutes later.

His fascination with first responders continued when we moved to Maryland. He discovered that there would be a uniformed police officer at our front doorstep minutes after pushing ‘911’. We had lots and lots of police officers visiting our house! Seeing how badly we felt for his calls, they kindly didn’t charge us for all the nuisance calls.

We received the same kind of understanding and kindness from strangers when he went through his fascinations with car antennas. Whenever he would get close to one, to our horror he’d snap it! We tried our best to make sure he wouldn’t get close to another one but he somehow managed to do it anyhow. We left note after note at these poor people’s cars.

Meanwhile, all the stress took a toll on all of us. Jack who was in constant pain from muscular dystrophy was diagnosed with cancer – twice. Maxi was constantly sick and struggled with asthma and eczema. I had gained a ton of weight. Joint pain, being overwhelmed and without any energy was the new norm for me.When I stumbled across Shaklee’s natural cleaners, I was mildly excited. Maybe they would help Maxi with the skin rashes she was experiencing and at least, with them being natural, I was told I didn’t have to worry about Benni taking a sip. That was a concern as he had just eaten Maxi’s Nair cream… “But Mom, it had a picture of a mango on it!”…

When the cleaners worked wonders and Maxi’s rashes and dry patches went away, we tried the supplements. We thought it couldn’t hurt for us to take some vitamins but we didn’t expect to feel so much better! Maxi went from being constantly sick to rarely getting sick at all.Jack who had tried narcotics to relieve the constant throbbing pain in his hands, feet, hips and neck, didn’t like the side effects. Once he tried one of the supplements that was made from the muscadine grape, his pain gradually went away and he didn’t have a need for narcotics anymore.I was actually starting to feel human again. Benni stopped taking his ADHD medications and we tried him on some of the mind supplements instead. They didn’t make his processing issues go away but we were now able to work with him on twenty math problems without taking a break when he was previously only able to do ten.

Soon, we started to share our experiences with our friends. We wanted them to have the same experiences we had – and they did. At the beginning of December, we pledged to donate a portion of our bonus check to Inova Children’s Hospital, the hospital that had saved Benni’s life twenty years ago. As it were, December happened to be the month with the most orders we ever had in the past six years! As I was making the donation, I felt that things had come full circle. The products that had helped us make it through the toughest years of our lives also enabled us to give back to the very hospital that saved our son two decades ago.