After sharing a post highlighting our struggles with our daughter's mental health, several friends reached out and requested I establish a GoFundMe to fundraise as a means to help our family.

All that to say, I expect absolutely nothing but appreciate anything. Our goal in life is to help Aeris while also respecting her future and how sharing those experiences may impact her.

Those of you who know our situation know that Aeris was hospitalized right after Christmas in 2022, and we have had an uphill battle to help her with her mental health since. After a year of working with various professionals, we have finally established Intensive In-Home Therapy and have her enrolled in a crisis psychiatric program at a local hospital with the Director of Child Psychiatry.

Through all this, we weathered an incredibly painful layoff right as I gave birth to Cillian, which resulted in a loss of paid parental leave, resources for our family, and even nearly losing both our home and car. We have fought tooth and nail to recover from this while affording a team of professionals to help our daughter, and it has taken an incredible toll. Helping her needs to be our first priority, and I am proud of our family for never letting her mental health take a back seat.

It is incredibly humbling to share all this, especially in sharing how much of a financial toll seeking treatment as taken during an already tumultuous time. Needless to say, our own medical needs (for example, two cracked teeth I received during these meltdowns have not been fixed) and finances have piled up as a result. Christmas will not be as we had hoped in so many ways, not just in terms of gifts.

We face meltdowns daily that destroy Christmas trees, put holes in the walls of our home, and quite honestly have traumatized her younger brothers. We live in a constant state of hypervigilance that keeps us in crisis mode daily - quite literally, without any exaggeration, 24/7.

Our hope is to continue diving into intensive therapy to repair our family and rebuild for a stronger, healthier, and happier future for all 3 kids. That's all I can ever fight for and hope for as their mom.

Any funds raised will go toward Aeris' treatment - and admittedly, the occasional coffee after a sleepless week!

Again, we expect nothing. At all. But I had hoped to put this out there to communicate the most effective way to help our family right now for those who have asked.

Thanks for thinking of us and all the love.