With a calm voice and dry eyes, Tracee Peterson’s eight-year-old daughter, Sadie, held her mother’s hand for the first time in a month and said, “Mom, you’re OK. You’re gonna pull through.”

Peterson’s three oldest children —Hailey, 16; Dylan, 11 and Sadie— visited their mother Saturday and Sunday in her Seattle hospital. The children pushed their mother around the hospital floor in a wheelchair, listened to her make a cognitive breakthrough by counting for the first in a month and did not say a peep when she repeatedly asked them what happened to her.

Out of the intensive care unit, Peterson underwent the first of a series of interviews with Troy Police officer Lori Faulkner on Friday, one day after her husband, Joshua Peterson, posted bond. Tracee Peterson’s visitors and medical help are not allowed to discuss the Sept. 28 incident so as not to influence Peterson’s memory.

“She is so motivated,” Peterson’s father, Ed Hanson, said. “The doctors are saying she has a chance to really excel beyond the normal times of recovery.”

In one month since her husband allegedly beat her three times in the head with a baseball bat, Peterson has improved from an eight-day coma to walking with slight help around her hospital ward.

According to Hanson, Peterson is growing more aware every day. She knows she is in Seattle and badly wants to earn doctors’ approval to move out of the hospital and into an in-patient location.

Peterson is also said to be displaying her typical hardheadedness, which friends see as a strong sign of recovery.