A Life of Gratitude
It takes a lot of practice and work to live a life of gratitude.
It’s sitting in your darkest hours and deciding to be grateful for the experience.
My husband and I decided at the beginning of our marriage that we would live a life of gratitude.
There have been some hard days where we simply talked about being grateful for breathing.
There have been crazy days where we were grateful for silence.
November is the month where we are the most grateful.
We are grateful for the March of Dimes for without them and their research we wouldn’t have our son who was born too soon and needed everything to keep him alive.
I’m personally grateful that my husband was born in November for without that my life wouldn’t be full of laughter and craziness.
We pause and are exceptionally grateful that on November 22, 2013 our sweet boy was born and our lives were forever changed for the better.
He may have been whisked away in the dark of night to a bigger hospital and I may have waited 79 grueling hours before I could hold him for 5 minutes before his stats went crazy and he had to be laid down.
We are grateful for the journey he’s on.
It’s not the one we ever pictured but it’s one that has made us better people. One that we couldn’t imagine not being on.
We take nothing about Whitman for granted.
We are grateful for our families. They support us and they love our sweet boy for who he is and not for what they hoped he’d be.
We are grateful daily for his team at school. They believe in our son and force him to believe in himself.
Whit lives a life like the friends episode: “They don’t know that we know that they know that we know” and his school brings out the best of what he knows.
We are grateful for our therapy team they push him to the next level. They are his people.
We are grateful that Whitman only really knows love right now and that he is free to be whoever he wants to be.
No clothes today?! Perfect.
Want to wear 8 pairs of pants and change your proloquo2go to talk like a pirate phenomenal buddy? Absolutely!
He has the best sense of humor and laugh.
In the throws of NICU life I can remember praying and saying: God I’m not sure what Whit’s future holds but if you could please give him a laugh that’s funnier than any punch line and a sense of humor that exceeds any comedian.
I felt that because his life started out so rough and still has challenges that I would be grateful if he was happy and he is.
Through the diagnosis’s that chipped away at us over the years we choose to be grateful.
It takes a mental practice that I can’t really explain but with grace and motivation that is unyielding to be grateful.
Somedays we have pages of things we are grateful for and some days we are grateful we got dressed and no child was injured during our day.
We honestly wouldn’t be this mentally stable with what life has dished out to us without our team mentioned above.
A wise person once said: “Find your tribe and love them hard.”
We have. We do.
And we are grateful.
Written by, Lindsey Althaus
My name is Lindsey Althaus. And I’m the mom to the amazing Whitman who has apraxia and ASD and Genevieve who is Whitman’s “voice” with a side of sass. I’m a professional chauffeur Monday-Thursday, like most moms, and live for Jammie day Friday’s. We try to navigate this crazy life with gratefulness and a sense of humor.
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