Our Babies

Our Babies
Luke and Claire

"Welcome to Holland"


By Emily Perl Kingsley, 1987. All rights reserved.


I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away...because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss. But...if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Daddy's Magic Touch



Good morning! Last night was pretty eventful in the fact that it wasn't eventful!

After dinner and watching The Blind Side, Melissa and I split up our duties. She went to bed while I went to spend the first shift with Luke in his room. The recliner rocker we have is great for sleeping! I changed him and gave him his bottle and pressed the timer buttons on our Itzbeen (a cool thing that tells you how long it's been since you fed, changed, and a few other functions). He went right to sleep so I put the little dude down in his crib and he passed out. So I followed suit, thinking he would wake me up when he needed something. I was three feet away and had my IPhone playing songs real low.

Later that night I woke up and heard him breathing nicely. Not knowing what time it was (or more importantly, how long it had been since his last feeding) I grabbed the Itzbeen and looked. Then I looked again....It had been 4hrs and 45mins since his last feeding! The nurses had told us to feed him every 3-3.5 hours when he starts crying, but he never did fuss! While he really isn't a newborn anymore, we thought he wasn't quite ready to sleep all night. So I woke up Melissa for her shift and told her that he was still asleep. She woke up him up and fed and changed the little chucker and he didn't wake up until this morning!

However, this morning my mom was reading the paper in the living room when she saw both of our dogs open the baby gate by our front door and come into the living room. They apparently were checking out how Luke was doing. Some of you might think I'm kidding when I say that, but they really are concerned about Luke! Well, more so Sophie than Ralphie. He just likes to lick him, but Sophie is once again a concerned mother! When Luke cries or fusses, she wants to get right up to him to see what's wrong. We love our dogs!

Well, that's it for now. We went out around the block in our awesome stroller yesterday to test it out and today we are planning on going shopping around town to see how things go. Wish us luck!

2 comments:

  1. Way to go P-Daddy ;) notice i changed a vowel in your name. Hope all continues to go well. Love all the pictures and updates.

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  2. I love that first pic of him! Our cats are protective of Raina too. When she was sick once I had to hold her down to clean out her nose and she SCREAMED, and the cat totally mauled my leg because she thought I was hurting her. Enjoy the fresh air today!

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