I got to choose her first name - Fiona.

Her father chose her middle name - Claire.

I got to choose her Easter dresses, her birthday and the Winnie the Pooh motif on all of her furniture. I chose her godparents and her doctor and her first shoes. Her father chose

her car seat and her bath toys and the darling little shirt that said “Oink!” with the piglet on it. We chose her Christmas ornaments and the gifts under the tree.

We chose to have our Fiona. We did not choose autism.

In the beginning, before I was able to get an “official” diagnosis, my choice was to comb the message boards and Google for hours. I chose to buy hundreds of dollars worth of educational toys and videos. I chose to chat online with other mothers whose children were diagnosed and I chose to cling to the ever-dimming hope that I was wrong. For weeks, I vacillated between anger and resignation, certainty and confusion, jealousy and joy. There were days where all I focused on was autism and all of the negative stories. There were nights that I did not sleep – instead I made list after list of everything Fiona would miss. Everything we, as her parents, would never experience. I mourned and I raged and I begged and I cried and I made more lists and I surfed and read and researched.

The internet is a miraculous thing. The amount of information available is overwhelming – whether it's autism or auto mechanics. Want to spend hours reading tragic story after tragic story about an autistic child? I have your message board. Interested in insurance nightmares? Educational struggles? I've got another hundred message boards for you. Vaccines? Type “autism” and “vaccine” and you get almost one million Google hits. Or perhaps you would rather read about autism from the perspective of an adult with autism – there are literally hundreds of blogs to choose from. And some are joyful and some are depressing and some are infuriating and some made me sob. I gave up a thousand times and started over a thousand and one.

Then one day, as I was wallowing in my pain and anger, a question came to mind.

Do you want to spend time mourning the daughter you can never have or do you want to spend time loving the daughter you have been given?

And then I made my choice.

I turned off the computer and I began to dance with Fiona.

I abandoned my quest to find out “how” it happened, because frankly, I don't care.

I tore up those mental lists of everything we were cheated out of and made longer lists of our blessings and accomplishments.

I dug out my sign language book from college and began working on communicating with my daughter.

I made the decision to do everything I could to make Fiona's life her own, as opposed to the one I wanted for her.

I remembered that I have 3 special and unique children, not just one with autism.

I began to celebrate every small victory and accomplishment, because they mean so much more.

We chose to be Fiona's mommy and daddy and not victims of autism.

And now, every day, I choose to be happy.

As a sidenote, it has been almost a year to the day that we were told that Fiona was severely autistic and would most likely be non-verbal. I guess no one shared that with her, since at last count, she is at close to 100 words (and Mommy is one of them!), can say her ABCs & count to 20 and can recite much of "Green Eggs And Ham" from memory. Every single day, there is another step forward -- what more could we ask for?