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.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Mmmmmmm

Luke LOVES sitting in his high chair like a big boy! In fact, today he started crying at school because they tried to feed him a bottle instead of cereal. We're actually going to head to Target to buy new baby food tonight!

In other news, Luke had a playdate with his friends Anna, Joseph, Grace, Rece, Evan, and Gwen. All of the daddies have been extremely busy with work, so all of the mommies decided to get together for dinner. Everyone had a great time playing together, but Luke sure was tired when he got home.

I am participating in an audit at work, so I had to miss our favorite appointment of the week with Ms. Anita :( However, the Ms. Tiffany (Luke's teacher) gave me the full report and said he did a great job sitting up in his Bumbo seat and rolling over.

Luke is very excited because he has a new friend also named Luke who was just born the other day! AND....we're eagerly waiting on the his next friend to be born! Some of our best friends, the Larsons (I lived with Christy, and Patrick lived with her husband, Lars, before we were all married) are just about to have their first baby! Luke can't wait to meet his new friends! Keep your fingers crossed he arrives soon :0

1 comment:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)