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, January 5, 2013

Christmas in the Islands


So we didn't want to hang out in our OWN hotel room in Hawaii for Christmas...so we got another one on another island.  We found out that one of the local airlines has a great deal for military and we hopped over to Kauai.  The island couldn't be more different than Oahu!  Oahu, where Honolulu is located, is more of a concrete jungle on the southern end.  The northern part is really secluded, but all the same.  Kauai is totally quiet, with a bunch of two lane highways.  A lot of small surfing towns and a bunch of roosters!  Crazy.  


This is the view from our room.  This was the morning that we left.  The other two days were just dreary and rainy!  Go ahead, feel bad for us...
This was the Waimea Canyon.  Pretty ugly, we know.  We were forced to to look at this by armed guards.  Ok, not really.  Our friends told us about this.  Absolutely amazing!

Claire-Bear decided to dress up this year!  Ok, this was her first year, but whatever!

My sweet little girl!  Now that she doesn't scream all day, it's hard not to fall in love!
 Then we had to come home, but we still had time for fun!  The rest of the week of Christmas was min-manning, so we hit a few of the beaches around the island.  A local family built this:

Hawaii Snow Man!


Claire-Bear is starting to finally sit up!  Though something to her right must be pretty interesting!
This is the view at the top of a pretty long hike, but it's stroller friendly, so that makes it worth it!  That thing in the middle is a light house...so we are actually above it!  Again, pretty terrible.  


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