Like a good big sister, 4-year-old Raelynn Keller helps her younger brother Hunter with everything. She helps with the little things, like brushing his teeth, using utensils at mealtime, or kicking a ball. She helps him with the bigger things, like the diagnosis of misfiring synapses he received just over a year and a half ago when he was 6 months old. And she also helps raise awareness for his disorder, which triggers petit mal seizures, can impact motor skills and daily life, and is different from epilepsy, though people often group the two together.
This fall, Raelynn made batches of homemade mango and pineapple salsa and blueberry barbeque sauce to sell during the month of November, the official seizure disorder awareness month. She recently donated the proceeds, $227.23, to the Child Development Center (CDC), a nonprofit agency in Kalispell that provides support for families like the Kellers who are raising children with disabilities or delays in seven counties across Montana.
The Kellers began working with CDC family support specialist Kristin Hoffman soon after Hunter’s diagnosis. Doctors and friends told Hunter’s mother, Taelon Keller, that he would “never eat on his own, talk on his own, never amount to anything and never accomplish anything.” With Hoffman’s coaching, the Kellers began building therapy into daily rituals like family meals and bath time.
Raelynn was always eager to be a part of the therapy. She wants him to be happy, to be able to play with her, and to have relief from the seizures, which she calls headaches.
“I help him eat his food,” she said. “I encourage him and talk to him, I try to make him laugh.”
The therapy is working. Hunter hasn’t had a seizure in the past year, and he’s been off his medication for four months. When he plays with his sister, he seems just like a regular kid.
“He’s made amazing gains,” Carolyn Prussen, executive director at the Childhood Development Center, said.
It’s a family effort, but Taelon says her daughter’s care and support for her brother is “the most vital part about him testing normal,” referring to his therapy evaluations and different motor skills and cognitive reasoning tests, many of which Hunter now aces.
Raelynn’s contribution to the CDC will fund the installment of a structure to make the agency’s therapeutic swing more widely accessible — a tangible result that Taelon says will help Raelynn understand her valuable impact on the community.
“It’s to show my brother how much I love him,” Raelynn said.
She has three jars of barbeque sauce left.
Her plan: “We’ll sell it all, then we’ll make more.”