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.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Busy Week

 Oh my goodness! Sorry that almost a week went by with no blog. We've been very busy...

Luke had his 6 month checkup on Friday, and his doctor couldn't be happier with his progress. He weighs 15 lbs 13 oz. and is 25.2 inches tall.  He passed his developmental milestone assessment, so OT and PT are paying off big time! Ms. Anita and Ms. Jessie will be very happy to hear the report at our appointments this week.  The doctor also mentioned that we can move on to stage 2 baby food, juice, and soft table food. What?!?!?! It is already time for that???? We started the sippy cup adventures on Sunday, and needless to say, it was pretty funny to watch. Luke actually did pretty well with the cup, but he was a little too clumsy for me to help him out and get a cute picture. More to come on that later.

On Saturday, Luke had a much more exciting adventure than visiting the doctor. We went to the pumpkin patch with some of our best friends and their new neighbors. Even though Luke is a little young, it was still fun to get him out and pick out pumpkins. The day was super fun,  minus the insane heat. We had it in our heads that it would feel like fall because we were at the pumpkin patch, but everyone was covered in dirt and sweaty by the end of the day.
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On Saturday night, Patrick's squadron hosted a Murder Mystery Party, so Luke had a babysitter. Our usual sitter, Shannon, already had another babysitting job, so it was time to try out a new sitter. My co-worker's daughter, Aerika, came over to play with Luke. She was especially excited to hear that Luke has Down Syndrome because her little brother also has it! We had a great time talking about our experiences/thoughts about it. Hopefully she'll be able to come over LOTS in the future to play with Luke.

1 comment:

  1. AnonymousOctober 19, 2010 at 12:07 PM

    So cute! He is getting huge!!! Looks like you guys had fun at the pumpkin patch.

    ReplyDelete

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