Ana Leigh Schaf, now 10 months old, was born with a small pink malformation, known as a strawberry hemangioma, but as she continually grows, the small spot is growing as well.

"When she was born, the doctor showed us a birthmark on her face," said Ana's mother, Chantel Schaf. "The first few months it was just a small dot-like birthmark called a strawberry hemangioma, but it began to grow. We asked the doctor, and he said that it would clot itself, but it didn't."

Chantel Schaf and her husband, Chris, live in Mandan.

The blood inside a hemangioma usually clots and the hemangioma disappears. Ana's is not clotting and is growing so large that it is pulling down on the side of her face, potentially causing blindness in her left eye. Ana's doctors have decided that it is too risky to wait for the hemangiomia to clot by itself.

Ana and her parents have to fly to the Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock, Ark., for the surgery. The urgency of the surgery is so high that Ana and her family have only two weeks to raise 30 percent of her total medical costs, $12,000.

This fee must be paid before a surgeon will even see Ana.

"She has been the perfect, perfect little baby," her mother said. "If we get it done now, she won't even know when she is older that she needed to get anything done."

In support of Ana, there will be a freewill donation spaghetti supper and silent auction at the Mandan Community Center gym from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Sunday. There also is an account set up in Ana's name at Dakota Community Bank in Mandan.

"All our friends and family are coming together, and we are having this big old bash," Chantel Schaf said. "Hopefully, it turns out."

(Kay Kemmet is a student at Bismarck High School.)