Keeping Marja alive was within the reach of medicine. That she's living a life close to normal three years later seems miraculous to her mother.

"The more I learn about the life of a child that survives being born at 23 weeks, the more I realize we are witness to a miracle with her," said Miaja Cassidy, an attorney who was in Rhode Island on business in January 2002 when Marja was born prematurely. Her father, Brendan, got there in time for her birth on Jan. 9, one minute too late for his birthday.

Now Marja is an energetic sprite of a girl weighing 27 pounds. She wears glasses and hearing aids but otherwise seems like a normal 3-year-old. She peppers a visitor to her St. Paul home with questions: "What's your name? Where's your car? Where's your backpack?"

Everyone has a backpack, of course. It's an important item at her preschool. She uses hers to play "office" in the foyer at home. She squeezes her nose, delighting in the sounds she can make, then says, "You shouldn't do that too much." She tells her nanny that her car is dirty, and she wants to clean it.

Her mother has no idea why she gave birth prematurely, but she knows it's more common than people realize. About one in eight babies is born before 37 weeks of pregnancy in the United States, accounting for 470,000 births a year, and half the time no one knows why.

The March of Dimes is in the midst of a five-year, $75 million campaign to find out why it happens and how to prevent it. Miaja will do anything she can for the cause. "I was a perfectly healthy person, and it happened to me," she said.

The Cassidys now also have a son, William, born at the end of December. He was delivered close to term, weighing 7½ pounds after Miaja spent the last four months of her pregnancy on bed rest. "Every day there was a little bit of panic in me: 'I've got to keep this baby in,' " she said.

William is a healthy, happy boy, quick to smile.

Marja is susceptible to illness, and her lungs don't work well. She had eye surgery a year and a half ago. She was recently found to have hearing loss, which to her mom seemed one burden too many for such a tiny girl to carry. But she's coming to terms with it, grateful that Marja could get help with hearing aids.

Doctors will continue to monitor her progress as she grows up. "Developmentally, she seems in many ways to be at or above where they expect her to be, and in other ways we just don't understand what's going on with her brain," Miaja says.

Marja is in a special education preschool so she can get vision, hearing and other services, and she loves it, her mom says. She greets staff members by name as she arrives, and she makes herself useful, seeing that the children's backpacks are ready at the end of the day.

"She does seem like an old soul, kind of, wise beyond her years," Miaja says. "Her life will never be an easy, carefree life. She acts like it is. She doesn't know any different."

By Donna Halvorsen