Over the years Niamh had watched her daughter grow with pride, hardly able to believe that she had been gifted with such a wonderful child. Despite her pointed ears, Aredhel or "Ari" as she preferred to be called, had grown up quite normally for the most part. Except for several strange occurrences that had quite startled Niamh. One such occurrence was when a four year old Ari had fallen and scraped her knee. Gathering the sobbing child into her arms, Niamh had prepared to daube the wound with peroxide, only to watch the cut heal itself in a matter of seconds. Astonished, she had raced to call Ernie, only to be told that she was imagining things.
Another time when Aredhel had gone to spend the night at a friend's house, her friend's mother had come in to check on them after they had fallen asleep. She had come running out a couple of seconds later, screaming at the top of her lungs that Aredhel was glowing. While Mrs. Velthouse was scoffed at openly, Niamh herself wasn't sure that she hadn't had a valid point. She had often wondered if there was something wrong with the baby, having come in quite a few times herself to the sight of Ari glowing but Ernie was convinced it was only a reflection from the moonlight. While this glowing secretly worried Niamh, it also served a useful purpse. If one of the parents of Aredhel's other friends happened to "catch" her glowing, they would not mention it for fear of being classified along with that "crazy Mrs. Velthouse".
Besides these two occurrences there was only one other instance that had had Niamh worried. During her early childhood Ari had had a habit of going up to people and telling them what they were thinking. This had been cute when she was little but as she grew older people began to get annoyed and to give her funny looks. Attempting to explain to Ari that people did not appreciate children coming up to them and pretending to read their thoughts, Niamh had received only a blank look and a plaintive "But, Mommy, I wasn't pretending. Finally, Ernie, running out of patience, had ended the matter by sending Ari to her room without dinner, telling her that if she ever spoke of being able to read other people's thoughts again he would "tan her hide good".
Although Niamh worried about Ari's strange traits, there was one particular one that she was actually grateful for: Ari never got sick; not during the winter cold season or during the kindergarten chicken pox outbreak or even when the school in their small town was closed down due to a Bronchitis outbreak.