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.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

Initial Meeting

Success! Today, Dee, our case manager for Early Steps, the state sponsored early intervention program, came over to get Luke officially enrolled in the program. There was only a small mountain of paperwork, and she thinks Luke can get scheduled for his initial assessment as early as next week or the week after! Then, based on the results, we'll develop a plan for Luke's therapies to help him reach his developmental milestones. In addition, we also talked to an outpatient physical therapy office so that Luke can continue to work with Karen, his physical therapist from NICU who is AWESOME!!!!!! Some people are soccer moms...I'm a therapy mom! Good thing I like to spend time in my car because we're in for a lot of driving around :)

1 comment:

  1. Ronnie and SuziMay 27, 2010 at 11:44 PM

    Great news! :)

    PS...hehehe! my 'word' to unscramble in order to post this comment was 'therapt'...too close to 'therapy' to not make me smile!

    ReplyDelete

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