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.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Visitors

What better way to spend the weekend than hanging out with friends? On Friday, the usual crew from the neighborhood spent the evening hanging out together while Luke slept soundly in his stroller. Then, on Saturday we went to a BBQ with daddy's friends from work. We couldn't stay long though because Laura, one of mommy's best friends arrived in town with her boyfriend, Brian for a short visit. While Patrick spent Sunday picking up some extra flying hours, the rest of us toured the Parade of Homes to find Laura and Brian a place to live in Louisiana (We're trying to convince them to move here!). Then, we finished the weekend with a relaxing night on the boat.

During all of his social outings, Luke worked on perfecting his newest trick - sucking his thumb. While he can't quite get it right, he decided that just shoving his fist in his mouth would work just fine. We'll keep working on getting some pictures, but mommy and daddy have been a bit too slow with the camera on that one; however, here are some other pictures from the weekend.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)