Before my sister graduated and moved out, the room in the very back of our house was a bright, awful yellow, radiating off the walls and burning the eyes of anyone unlucky enough to lay their gaze upon it. I remember sitting on her bed, all naivete and childlike bliss, while she tried harder and harder to make my hair look exactly like Pebbles’ from The Flintstones. It was an interesting way to pass the time; I was just happy to sit and gaze at the awful walls while she tugged and pulled at my hair. Sometimes, if she wasn’t delving into experimental cosmetology, she would turn on Cha-Cha Slide on her awfully large stereo (how 2004) and try to teach me the dance moves. I was never very good at dancing, to say the least.
Nevertheless, I have extremely vivid, aesthetic memories of her room from my early childhood, most likely because she was a teenager and, as teenagers were obviously the coolest things ever in the eyes of a six year old, I looked up to her in the way someone can only look up to an older sister. Her room was a center of learning for me: how to do hair, how to dance, how not to paint your walls. Each time I walk in there, it’s almost as if I can still feel her tugging at my hair with all the concentration she could muster.

Dissection is a way for students to get a hands-on feel for how an organism’s body works. It makes students think about how actually miraculous it all is; all of the picking and prodding at with things pays off by teaching us the inner workings of something. We learn about the way it stays alive, the way it reproduces, the way it lives. Whether it be an earthworm, or a frog, or a cat, students always learn a lot of stuff when they take those scissors, cut open an organism, and dive into an exploration of the workings of an organism, no matter how gross they think it is.

I learned that out of milk, coke zero, apple juice, and orange juice, orange juice is the quickest to be soaked up by a thin sponge.

I liked the fact that the semester project was fun.

I wish I knew more about how much the sponges I bought would hold before we started the experiment.

Sometimes there’s a time in your life that you would think would end up in disaster, but, sometimes, a miracle comes through. You usually promise to yourself that you will be eternally grateful to God, but we always somehow end up breaking that promise. It’s these moments that make us realize that life is fragile, and we should never take it for granted.

One day I walked inside my room and decided I would clean out my desk drawer. I had nothing else to do anyway. I was absent-mindedly cleaning as I came across a tiny little hospital bracelet that could barely even fit around my little finger. I began to grow more and more curious about the bracelet, so I decided to ask my mom. I remember her proud eyes as she said “That was your bracelet from when you were a little baby in the hospital” I had always known I was born drastically early, but I had never gotten the full story. Timidly I asked “Mom, what was it like?” and slowly became enveloped in her story.

It was June 1998 and my mom was 7 months pregnant in a post office when her water suddenly broke. She was rushed to the nearest hospital with a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, which was Baylor Hospital in Dallas, 2 hours away from our small East Texas town. Whenever a baby was born this premature there were usually horrible complications, but whenever I was born somehow my lungs were fully grown and I was healthy as a horse, even though I do admit my dad jokingly asked if they were sure I wasn’t an alien. I was a picture of helplessness in the little incubator they put me in. I had to be fed through wires put into my nose and I was hooked up to all sorts of machines that did who knows what just to try to keep me healthy. That day I would always smile as my parents walked by, somehow knowing that these people were the ones who would take care of me and love me all my life no matter what.

My mom smiled as she remembered that part “The doctors said it was just gas, but I know that little baby knew who we were.” That day I learned a big lesson. A miracle is something that gives hope in a time that seems nothing good would happen. I looked up at my mom’s eyes as she said “So, basically the whole point of me telling you this is to tell you that, Kathryn, you are a miracle.”