'We just fell in love with her at first sight'

Catherine and Trish Emmons and daughter Priscilla, 3, are the focus of our new A Family Like Mine video.

Priscilla, known as Cilla, was born dependent on drugs to a mother who couldn't care for her. She spent her first month in the neonatal intensive care unit in pain, on morphine, inconsolable. At nine months, Trish and Catherine adopted her.

"When we first brought her home, we noticed that she would have huge temper tantrums when we would leave her," Catherine recalls. "And I don't mean by leaving the house. I mean she would be in the living room and we'd get up to get a cup of coffee and she would start having a temper tantrum because she was so distraught that you were going to leave her. Because a lot of people don't realize that kids, babies, suffer loss. They think 'Oh, they don't remember.' But at that point she'd already suffered from two major losses. One from her birth mom, and one from her foster mom."

This is a remarkable family with great insights on parenting, adoption and celebrating differences. Thank you to social worker Barb Germon for suggesting them.

A Family Like Mine is a video series about diverse families raising children with disabilities. It's incorporated into the curriculum for second and third year medical students at the University of Toronto.