Some people asked me why I modeled some of the main characters off of the real life us.  There were several reasons; vanity not being one of them.

Realism:  I wanted the characters to be as real as possible.  I wanted the backstory and character development to be as real as possible.  Obviously, not everything written on paper is real.  Come on!  This isn’t the Internet I’m writing here!

To help people:  When our son was in the NICU for weeks, several babies around us did not make it.  Going to the Cerebral Palsy clinics, there were kids much worse than our son.  Our son didn’t seem to have anything super spectacularly wrong (besides the CAMT), but it was a massive amount of things.  It is easy to get lost in our darkest hours.  Hope, however far fetched, can be our only salvation.  Sometimes, people just need to see someone else who made it through the struggles to realize they can make it through as well.