“He said, ‘Mom, I just want to know her … no matter how long she’s here.’” “I could not assure him that she would be OK, but I told him that we just needed to pray for her,” wrote Gwen. “Why couldn’t Lola be born without a disability?” Big brother Cal, who already doted on Claire, asked questions about Lola and her health. “I remember crying for a day or two straight, trying to make sense of why this was occurring a second time,” Gwen wrote on her blog. Gwen - a former teacher turned stay-at-home mom in Kansas - got pregnant again in 2006 at the 26-week sonogram, doctors gave her the news that this daughter too, named Lola, would have microcephaly.

She couldn’t speak or walk or sit upright, but by the time she reached 5, the family felt ready to have another baby. Story: What Parents Need to Know About the Condition Caused by Zikaĭespite doctors saying Claire would not make it past a year, the baby girl grew to be a happy, energetic child. The Hartleys had no idea their first daughter, born after son Cal, now 17, was at any risk for the condition (which her doctors surmise is genetic) until she was born with a small head. We love our lives.”īoth Hartley daughters - Claire, 15, and Lola, 10 - have the small heads and brains characteristic of microcephaly, and they also have dwarfism, spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy, and epilepsy.

Now that the World Health Organization has declared Zika an international health emergency and many affected countries have advised that women not get pregnant, this mom of three is talking about her own experiences with microcephaly, and she says of her family, “We are all happy. Gwen Hartley has stories to share about raising two daughters with microcephaly, the condition that has been linked to the mosquito-carried Zika virus.

Mom and her 2 daughters artoon