Chloe!

Psalm 139

“I want iPad!” exclaims Chloe. While this plea is quite the resolution from a 5 year-old, Chloe’s request is actually a huge praise for the Truelove family.

Chloe Truelove is a lively little girl who loves giving hugs and being tickled. Her favorite TV show is the cartoon Ni Hao, Kai-lan about a Chinese-American girl’s adventures growing up. Like Kai-lan, Chloe has already had many adventures of her own. Chloe was adopted from China when she was 13 months old by her parents, Chris and Hailee Truelove. Chris is the Executive Director at Special Kids and Hailee is a speech language pathologist. The Trueloves knew that the Lord was calling them to adopt, and when they filled out their adoption paperwork, they made the decision to mark that they were open to having a child with special needs.

The Trueloves followed the Lord’s calling and arrived in China to meet their daughter. “There’s no doubt that God designed her for us and us for her,” said Hailee. “It’s hard to explain, but the minute that we saw Chloe and she saw us, we both knew that it was her before they told us which one she was.”

Soon after bringing Chloe home, the Truelove family realized that she was experiencing some difficulties. She could not eat, sit up on her own, or drink from a bottle. At that time, Chloe was diagnosed with developmental delay and hypotonia, or low muscle tone. Later, Chloe was also diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), which means that Chloe has difficulty planning and producing the precise movements of the mouth that are needed to speak.

“We knew that Special Kids would help and had faith and hope that God would put the right people in her life at the right times,” Hailee said. In 2009, Chloe started receiving services at Special Kids in physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech language pathology. When she started, Chloe had trouble with hand-eye coordination and with the balance and coordination of her core muscles. Despite working on her speech at home, Chloe was still completely nonverbal.

“Chloe’s not being able to speak was really hard because [as a speech therapist] I had the skills to fix her, but there wasn’t anything I could do,” said Hailee. “We started praying about it differently, and soon Chloe’s speech therapist at Special Kids, Andrea Terry, found a different program to help her.”

The new oral therapy program helped to strengthen Chloe’s muscles and gave her the skills she needed for when, a year later, she was able to say her first words. The Trueloves waited until their daughter was 4 ½ years to hear her say ‘Mama’ for the first time. Soon after, Chloe also learned how to say ‘Baba,’ which is Mandarin Chinese for dad and what Chloe fondly calls her father, Chris.

“When I walk in the door, she says ‘Baba here! Baba here!’ and runs and knocks me down, few things are that precious,” Chris said. Today, Chloe is talking nonstop! Her coordination has developed to the point that she is working on maneuvering around objects and throwing a ball underhand. She is also working on her fine motor skills of buttoning and writing, but her hand-eye coordination has improved to the point that she is a ‘pro’ on her iPad and loves playing golf on the Wii with her older brothers.

Psalm 139 tells us that God has every one of our days written in His book before there is one of them. The Lord knew Chloe before she came to be and had an amazing plan in mind for this precious little girl. “God knit Chloe together in her mother’s womb to be our daughter,” said Chris. “How big, how purposeful God is for Him to have her born on the other side of the earth and have her be our little girl.”

Chloe walking

Chloe climbing

Chloe and her iPad