The SpecialMoms Parenting Magazine Issue 5 | Page 23

Faith, Hope, & Love
Please tell us a little about your family.

Sylvia Phillips

I got my start being a home
birthing, baby wearing mom
of nine way back when in
1976. I’m a homeschooling
mom and also grandma to
the sweetest grandson in the
world!
I blog at “Faith, Hope, and
Love”. You can keep up with
me on facebook or on twitter.

FaithfulMomOf9.com

We’ve been a homeschooling family since 1984 and
will be until 2019. My oldest is 38 and my youngest
is 12! My five oldest boys are all college graduates. My
oldest daughter will get her Bachelor’s degree in TESL
in May 2015 and then head off to China to teach English there. We have another daughter who will be getting married in June 2015. Jeremiah our 12 year old is
a Minecraft expert! Bethany is our special needs kid. In
2000 she was diagnosed with a pilocytic astrocytoma in
her cerebellum, a tumor that wreaked havoc in her whole
brain. My husband Malcolm is a clerk for the United
States Post Office.

Thinking about raising a child with multiple
diagnoses, can you elaborate on this
comment: “I wish I knew then what I know
now”?
I wish I would have known how devastating it would be for
our whole family to adjust to having a severely disabled sibling
and daughter. Bethany was like a completely different person
after her surgery. It was almost as if she had died and we
brought home another little girl. I wish we had been advised
to seek some kind of counseling so that we could have been
more prepared to deal with the adjustments.

I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been
to find out that your two year old daughter
had a brain tumor. Can you share with us
what symptoms Bethany was experiencing
that caused you to visit a doctor to learn of
her brain tumor?
Unfortunately, the symptoms of a brain tumor in the cerebellum are very similar to those of many diseases. Vomiting,
head ache, lethargy to begin with. At first we thought Bethany just had the stomach bug that had recently gone through
our whole family. But after bout two weeks of her continuing

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