The bouncy kindergartner with blond ringlets framing her smiling, pixie face wants to talk about the "SpongeBob" episode she's watching, and sings while she skips around the room.

She's the same little girl who threw a fit and screamed the F-word 40 times in after-school daycare earlier this school year.

A few weeks ago, she was kicked out of the after-school program run by the YMCA at her elementary school in the Fort Zumwalt school district in suburban St. Louis. The giggly 5-year-old who ran out of her room to show me her blue Furby doll already has a thick file outlining her problems at school.

"You could not tell that she has anything going on inside. You could not tell all the havoc going on inside by looking at her," her mother, Liza Pequeno, said.

Pequeno, a single mother who works as a nurse and nursing home administrator, panicked when the Y Club expelled her daughter with little notice. They decided they could no longer handle her behavior. Pequeno had already used all her personal time at work in meeting with school officials trying to get a plan and services for her girl, who was falling apart and out of control so often at school.

Her daughter has been on medication for hyperactivity since she was 4 years old. She has been evaluated by a psychiatrist to see if she falls on the autism spectrum, perhaps with Asperger's syndrome, and is waiting for a diagnosis. A diagnosis could help her mother advocate for a more specialized treatment plan.

But at that moment, Pequeno was in crisis mode. Who would take care of her child when she had to work?

"I get no child support. It's all me. I can't lose my job," she said. "I felt lost."

Already, the emails from her kindergarten teacher describing all the troubles of each day left her in tears every night: Her daughter cursed at the teachers, threw toys, hit another child or had another screaming fit.

She wasn't so chaotic at home. Her mother knew how to calm her down. The other children and the frequent transitions at school overwhelmed her. She had previously been expelled from a private preschool, but her mother managed to find a preschool for special needs children.

With no other options, Pequeno asked her 70-year-old stepmother to pick up her daughter after school and watch her until she got home.

She could tell when her girl had a bad day in kindergarten. Her eyes would be red from crying all day. She would run and hide in her bedroom when she got home.

"Am I bad, Mommy?" her daughter asked her.

Pequeno knows her daughter's behaviors are difficult to manage, but she refuses to believe she's just "a bad kid."

"I think she's in there. She's deep in there. We just haven't gotten to her yet."

A 2005 nationwide study by Yale researchers found that preschools expel youngsters at three times the rate of public schools. Where do the parents of these youngest children, written off at such an early age, turn?

This little girl has the advantage of an educated mother, a strong advocate willing and able to navigate various agencies. Ideally, this child should have gotten more help in learning critical skills to regulate her emotions and read social cues from as young an age as possible. It makes economic sense to invest early in children rather than try to correct problems later.

If an after-school program expels a troubled 5-year-old, where do we expect her to go?

Pequeno has given up on the school district, where she says teachers and administrators never tried to understand her daughter.

"I feel like I lost all faith, hope, trust in the school system," she said. And she knows it's difficult for a teacher who has more than 20 children in a class to try to carve out the time and energy to figure out what's really going on with her daughter when she loses control. It's easier to send her away, so the other students can learn.

She decided to put up their house for sale and rent an apartment in the Parkway School District, which is served by the Special School District in St. Louis County -- a group specifically trained to work with special needs children. Pequeno hopes the teachers will be better equipped to help her daughter.

When I visited, Pequeno showed me a stunning, colorful portrait of a girl's divided face that her daughter drew in school.

"That's beautiful," I said to the bubbly child, who just wanted to play with me. "Who is it?"

"I don't know," she said at first, then paused for a second.

"It's me."

CAPTION 01: Photo by Aisha Sultan.)

The minute I got bumped from my return flight, the thought crossed my mind that fate may be conspiring to grant a wish.

I had told my husband, when he drove me to the airport for this trip with my sisters, that this would be the year that I would actively try to visit a few dear friends I hadn't seen in decades -- my best friends from childhood and high school.

So many friendships are born of convenience, of our proximity to the people in our neighborhoods, schools, churches and workplaces. And even in this highly connected digital age, when people move away, the nature of those friendships change.

You can't just show up at the doorstep with good or bad news or when you're simply bored. When most of your travel is done to visit families and for work, a trip to visit an old friend, not prompted by a major life event, can be impossible to work into the schedule.

I met Kauser 30 years ago during our weekend religious instruction at the mosque. At first, we appeared to have nothing in common: She was born in Pakistan and came to America when she was 5. I had been born here. She was the youngest in her family, a social butterfly and wild child. I was the eldest, nerdy and pretty hopelessly square. We didn't attend the same school or travel in similar social circles.

But we both loved to laugh, and brought out a side of each other that most didn't see.

With her, I talked about boys, not books. We spent hours on the phone through those turbulent middle school years. We spent weekends together at the mosque in Houston.

She moved to Dallas right before we started high school. Even though I wouldn't see her as often, she was the sort of person who made an effort to keep in touch. She wrote notes and sent cards long before Facebook reminders nudged us to post birthday greetings on virtual walls.

Twice a year, on her birthday and mine, we would set aside a good part of the evening to catch up on the phone. She came to my wedding, and I was a part of hers a decade ago.

That was the last time we actually saw one another, despite my frequent trips to see my family in Houston. The stars never quite aligned for us to be in the same city at the same time.

And then, last weekend, Southwest Airlines oversold my return flight to St. Louis. I volunteered for another flight that would take me through Dallas, but then that flight was delayed more than an hour, leaving me just minutes to make the connection to St. Louis.

When I saw the delay, I wondered if the wish I had spoken two days earlier to my husband had mysteriously been heard.

I texted Kauser and told her I was flying through Dallas and might miss my connection.

"If I end up staying overnight, please come see me," I wrote. She asked for my travel information and said she would keep an eye on the flights.

En route to Dallas, I asked the flight attendant what my chances were of making my connection. She assured me the crew would wait since it was the last flight out that night and my previous flight had been delayed.

"We waited half an hour for a passenger yesterday," she said.

As we got closer to landing, I turned my phone on and saw a message that had been sent minutes earlier: "I'm here. I just need to find you."

I smiled and shook my head. Why did she drive half an hour out to the airport on a chance?

"Where are you?" I wrote back. "I'm still in the air. We haven't even landed."

"Girl, you better turn that phone off before I tell the pilot!"

Kauser said she was waiting down by the baggage claim, and I kept texting her updates: "We've landed, but I'm still on the plane."

"It's boarding," she wrote back about my connecting flight. She told me I was landing at Gate 7 and needed to race to Gate 3 to make the connection.

I sort of rushed to Gate 3. The ticker above the gate didn't say St. Louis.

"Haha! It already departed!!!" my friend texted.

The gate agent apologized and booked me on a flight for the next morning.

I walked down to the baggage claim, stopping to reapply some lip gloss and fix my hair.

We hugged each other tightly when we met. There is a joy in being able to physically hold a person you have known and loved for such a long time.

"The airline gave me a voucher for a hotel," I said.

She raised an eyebrow at me.

"And what exactly do you want to do with that?"

She drove me to her house and made me eat a late dinner. So much in our lives had changed in the past decade, but the ease of our conversation was the same.

While I was eating, she brought out a cheap porcelain figurine I had given her in 1987, the year we turned 13, the year she moved. On the bottom, I had scrawled in pencil: "Remember: You may look 'picture perfect' on the outside, but it's on the inside what counts. Love ya lots."

In the course of the next 27 years, I figured out what counted.

Some friendships last a season.

Others are meant for a lifetime.

Jen Popps changed into her depression clothes and sunk into the couch.

She prepared herself for the call from the nurse. It was never what they wanted to hear, and she had already started spotting.

She and her husband, Chris, had been trying to get pregnant for six years. They had done nine rounds of fertility drugs, nine rounds of intrauterine insemination -- a less-invasive treatment that uses a catheter to put sperm directly into the uterus when a woman is ovulating -- and one round of IVF.

The Popps had only been able to afford that costly treatment because of an inheritance Jen's grandfather had recently left for her.

"You try to be hopeful, but you also don't want to get your hopes up only to have them dashed every time," she said. "The more times we did it, the less optimistic we were each time."

Jen, 33, works as social worker for a rehab and therapy program in St. Louis, and Chris had worked in IT before he lost his job. They had spent about $13,000 on that IVF chance, and then Jen had started spotting.

No baby.

Again.

Their official diagnosis was "unexplained infertility."

"We didn't have any resources to try again," Chris said. It was a difficult time. They were heartbroken and started drifting apart.

"Sex stops becoming an intimate thing, and it becomes like a medical procedure," he said.

They decided to take a break and focus on their relationship. About six months later, a friend of Jen's emailed her a link to the Las Vegas-based Sher Institute for Reproductive Medicine (SIRM), which was running a national contest to give away free IVF cycles. The institute has eight locations, including one in St. Louis.

Jen forwarded the link to her husband and added a note: Let me know what you think. No pressure.

"I didn't know if I could handle it," Chris said. "I didn't know if I wanted to go down this road again." He thought about it and called her at work.

"I think we should do it."

Each couple had to submit a video about their story, which would be posted on Facebook. The 10 highest vote-getters would be considered by a panel of judges, and the winners picked from among them. The Popps worked together on their video, highlighting their deep friendship and how much they adored their nieces.

Once it was posted, it was on.

Jen went into full campaign mode. She posted the video and a plea for votes a couple of times a day on her page. She sent email blasts to her friends and families who were not on Facebook. Their video touched a nerve.

Her co-workers printed fliers and posted them all over the office, reminding people to vote frequently. One friend drove to every nearby McDonald's and Starbucks to vote from as many different IP addresses as possible. The Popps went on a local radio station to talk about their struggles with infertility and ask for votes. They would switch their phones in and out of airplane mode to pick up a new IP address and vote for two-hour stretches.

"We had this army of people to help us," Jen said.

They made the top 10. The day SIRM posted the winners, she and her co-worker kept refreshing the page on her computer. One name popped up. It wasn't them.

She kept refreshing.

And then their video showed up. The institute, which has given away more than 100 free cycles in the past, decided to pick three winners in this round.

"We went wild," Jen said.

Early last year, they had their consultation with Dr. Geoffrey Sher, executive medical director at SIRM, and decided to begin their free IVF cycle in April. Their doctor implanted two embryos on May 7. Ten days later, they would get back the blood-work results.

That morning, Jen started spotting at work. They had been down this road before. She emailed her mother: I don't think it's going to be good news. She came home from work. She and Chris laid on the couch together and cried for a couple of hours.

Finally the nurse called.

"Congratulations. You're pregnant."

"Are you

kidding me? Oh my gosh, I'm sorry I just cursed at you. I don't know what happened."

They posted the news on Facebook right way. So many people had been hoping and praying for them.

They stayed optimistically cautious for months. When they saw the ultrasound showing that they were expecting a boy, it began to feel more real. Around six months, they began to work on the nursery.

Late last month, Jen was induced on a Monday. On Wednesday, Leo Christopher Popp finally arrived.

His parents were very quiet. There were so many emotions.

This day had been so long in the making.

"I can't believe he's here, and I can't believe we get to take him home," Jen said. "This is real."