Mother’s Day – A special day of reverence. A day where many of us focus our love and efforts on showing our moms, grandmothers, and mother figures just how much we love them, and how much we appreciate all that they do for us. For others, Mother’s Day is a day to mourn a loss, and reminisce about pleasant memories of the past. When someone mentions Mother’s Day to me, my immediate mental image recall is of a specific photo on a particular mother’s day when the kids were little…
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From the second our babies are born we are teaching them independence. The goal is to grow up…right? And thankfully, most skills are just learned through observation. They don’t need to be taught. Especially if you have an older sibling. They see it done a few times and before you know it your toddler is using a spoon or sitting on the toilet. With this amazing kid it was different. Skills didn’t come naturally. Anything new was resisted. There was no…’I’ll do it myself.’ No independence. At age 8 we…
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I realized today that even though I have 6,000 photos on my iPhone…I had zero of me and my three boys. I felt like I was wrangling cats, got a few sighs and protests, cleaned dirty chocolate mouths, said a few threats and told them to stop fighting a few times. But I got it. It only took 30 to get the good one Take the photo dads. These babies grow up over night. It feels like yesterday I was celebrating my first Mother’s Day. And now I have 8…
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I never realized how much I wanted to be a mother until I was told I couldn’t. Until I was told my body would fail me. My body wasn’t, “good enough” to do what a woman’s body was, “supposed to.” I never knew how much I wanted to be a mom until that honor was taken away from me. After 2 ½ beautiful months he left our home returning to his teenager mother who changed her mind. One final signature, one last document, a teenage mother’s changed mind, and my days…
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I have two amazing daughters. Claudia is 15 and Keira is 13. They both are beautiful. They both have crazy curly red hair. And they both have Autism. A spectrum disorder that affects individuals differently and in varying degrees. They may share this diagnosis but in most ways couldn’t be more different. My Claudia has severe non verbal autism. She didn’t say her first real word until age 7. She still has toileting issues and needs assistance with every aspect of life. She rarely sleeps through the night and is…
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I am thinking about you today. I want you to know that everything you do matters. When you crawl into bed at night, aching from your temples to your toes, know that you have done enough. There may have been no progress made with toileting, feeding therapy or communication today and that is okay. Your child is safe and so loved. The weight of hectic schedules, parent trainings, OT, PT and visits with every other MD in-between can feel suffocating. The research, the meltdowns, the battles over chicken nugget brands…
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Mother’s Day… Oddly, each year it only gets harder. I knew my first Mother’s Day that something wasn’t quite right. I knew it deep in my gut—or should I say soul? I had dreamed of being a Mother and I had a vision of how it would be with my child. Now I see those visions—my visions—through others on Social Media. As a special needs parent, we miss out on so much. It seems to be the most typical things most take for granted that hurt the most. To be…
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It’s been 525,600 minutes since we last celebrated Mother’s Day. Has your child progressed as far as you hoped he would? Has he reached the goals you set for him? For those who have…congratulations! For those who haven’t, know that you are not alone. I remember a year when my daughter, Lizzie, came nowhere near reaching the goals I had set for her. Lizzie was diagnosed with autism days after her second birthday. She had every red flag…no functional language, no joint attention, no ability to communicate, and no awareness…
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A few weeks ago our family visited The Great Wolf Lodge in Bloomington Minnesota. This was a big thing for our family. Huge actually. Just like most kids, our boys love swimming. They love lazy rivers and wave pools. They love going places. And they love the idea of staying in hotels. But, and it’s a huge but, it’s not that easy for our family. Our oldest has autism. And while he loves to swim, it’s often overwhelming for him. Waterparks are crowded and loud. There is a lot of…
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This year, we stand on the edge of the end of your 5th year, right on the precipice of you turning 6. It has been over 3 years since I last heard your voice elicit words spoken from your heart as you yelled goodbye to your beloved garbage trucks as they turned out of our neighborhood out of sight. Now, you rarely glance up to watch the garbage trucks when they come by. Most days, I really cannot believe we are here…I thought we would have heard those words again…
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