I’m not dead

Hello there, bloggy friends!  Just wanted to let you know I was still alive and mostly well… usually.  Thank you to those of you who had been checking in on me.  It was nice to be missed.  I just seem to have a one-track mind (read- ADD, seriously) and have been focusing on other things lately.  As I recently observed about the people in my family, we don’t have hobbies, we have obsessions. And my obsession right now, besides taking care of my family, is the special needs support group at my church. 

I facilitate a support group for families of children with special needs at my church and it is going REALLY well.  Lots of new families, great volunteers, enthusiastic support from the church.  We are on a break for summer but plans are coming together for the Sept-May meetings.  It has been a big blessing to me, and many others from what I hear.  Isn’t it neat how that works!?  It has also further solidified my desire to work in the special needs field when I re-enter the work force.

Let’s see… updates… Mapman and I just recently spent a week volunteering at Bible Camp.  We were given, by design, a group that had a few boys with special needs in it.  Plus my buddy Gus (who I wrote about last year) came back and his mom specifically asked for me!  I was honored &  thrilled.  She gave me the biggest compliment by saying, “This is the one time I know I don’t have to worry about him.  I know he is okay with you.”  Gus had an AWESOME week.  It was amazing to see how much he has matured & grown since last year.  I also fell in love with Mapman all over again because he was INCREDIBLE with those boys.   The perfect balance of discipline & playfulness.  The kids loved him too!

Sad, though, that although Bible Camp made me swoon over my hubs, it also made me want to yell at him.  What an exhausting week!  It took a lot out of me, going there every night, being with so many energetic children who needed to be watched so closely.  I got progressively more & more MEAN and impatient as the week went on.  Kinda like a high-speed version of what happens to a marriage over time when you have a child with special needs.  I get why the divorce rate is so high… even when two people really love each other.  The sandpaper of constant stress wears the marriage thin.

Pity Party

          

Put on your festive hat and pull out the confetti, ’cause we’re havin’ a pity party up in here!  Oh my WORD, Internets, I am needing some love.  My week STUNK!  LITERALLY!!!!!!

It all started with a fateful call to my SIL over a week ago, “Yeah, even though there is a lot of drama in my extended family right now… we are doing pretty good in my house.  I am on top of everything, and able to handle stress better than I used to.”  JINX!

I am happy to report that for the past 2 months Percy had been going through a pretty easygoing period.  I had just recently started to relax out of my manic “survival mode”… you know, the one where I am the Energizer Bunny & keep going going going.  But in that mode I got SO MUCH DONE!!!!  Problem is there is no middle ground for me, so after that I kind of stalled.  BIG mistake.  I got behind on housework and paperwork last week.  This has really come back to haunt me this week.

Things started getting complicated last Saturday when Percy turned back into his alter-ego, Bizzarro Percy  (I don’t mean that disrespectfully.  I am alluding to comic books… Superman and his alter-ego Bizzarro Superman).  At Music Class, which he LOVES, he had his worst episode EVER and it made me so sad & scared.  It hasn’t gotten much better from there.  He had been like this for about 2 months in Oct/Nov (which prompted me to go on anti-depressants), and then had those 2 good months.  So I guess I am in for 2 rough months again.  He is back to EXCESSIVE tantruming, hitting, biting, rigidity, destructiveness.  It in itself is exhausting.  

And of course Thomas was sick last Sunday, and then Thursday BOTH kids got sick.  Not only is that time-consuming and exhausting and you worry for your kids but it also ruins social plans.  And you know what, when you have kids with special needs you really NEED social activities.  No church last week OR this week, we had to cancel fun plans for last night AND tonight, AND it is 60 degrees outside and sunny and I am stuck inside with poop and puke!  POUT!!!!!!!

YES, that’s right, the vomit monster is back AGAIN!  Oh how I wish it was a 24-hour thing, but NO, it’s Rotavirus.  First Percy… in the church hall, then the church bathroom, then the car, then the bathtub, then the bed.  Oh, by the way, when Percy threw up in the church bathroom I called for help and the male youth minister came in to assist.  You should have seen the funny looks he got when he came out.  That is how rumors get started .  Seriously though, he is an awesome man, a real servant.  And then Percy threw up in the car on the way to the Pharmacy and I couldn’t do anything about it.  I rolled down the window to let the Pharmacist (who is my Buddy) see a dripping Percy, and he said, “Niiiiice!”

And now the Monster has moved on to dear Thomas.  At 1am this morning… and 1:30am… and 2am… and 4am.  Thank goodness for hardwood floors and my Shark Steam Mop.  Oh, and plastic gloves.  I had wanted to mop Thomas’s floor, but not at 2am!  Go, go Gadget Steam Mop!  To make things worse Percy has now graduated to the leaky and STINKY diarrhea while Thomas is puking so I have MASS QUANTITIES of laundry.  I hate messes. I am a germophobe.  I don’t think I will ever feel clean again. 

So anyway, the point is, I was already feeling sorry for myself  because my youngest kept trying to bite me and my house was a mess and I felt overwhelmed and my Christmas tree was still up and now I have EVEN MORE to deal with.  Such is life.  LOL, I guess I should be cleaning instead of blogging, huh?  But this is making me feel better.  But I am going to log off now and keep on dealing with my life and its drama.  Like Dory in Finding Nemo, I will “just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. What can we do? We swim, swim…”

Let’s Keep Christmas

Henry Van Dyke wrote these words are approximately 100 years ago, yet they still hold just as much truth today.  I clipped it out of my newspaper last year… and kept it up ALL year to remind me.  That’s the whole point.

Keeping Christmas by Henry Van Dyke

Are you willing…

to forget what you have done for other people, and to remember what other people have done for you;

to ignore what the world owes you, and to think what you owe the world;

to put your rights in the background, and your duties in the middle distance, and your chances to do a little more than your duty in the foreground;

to see that men and women are just as real as you are, and try to look behind their faces to their hearts, hungry for joy;

to own up to the fact that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life;

to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe, and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness.

Are you willing to do these things even for a day? Then you can keep Christmas.

Support Group is on a roll!

This past week we held the third Support Group meeting at my church for families of children with special needs.  We had SIX families and a staff member attend!  We would have had EIGHT, but one house was full of sickos and another tired mommy accidentally fell asleep.  Considering that this group was thrown together in August, those are really exciting numbers.  Although I would have been excited by TWO.  And everyone seems to really be connecting.

The parents have all said, “Oh I needed this so much, thank you for starting this group!” And I smile, because one of the main reasons I asked if we could form the group was to help ME!  I couldn’t find a Christian support group nearby, so I started one! But I also have a heart to help people (on my good days), and all these pent-up ministry inclinations just waiting to be used.  Funny how God works… recently I was pretty upset that things didn’t work out the way I planned with another ministry that I wanted to be a bigger part of.  I was not given the opportunity to be in the leadership role I thought I wanted and I couldn’t understand why.  I have gone to seminary for goodness sake!  I got skillz!  But now I see that God had at least 2 reasons for holding me back on that ministry: 1. to humble me and give me more of a SERVANT’S heart, and 2. if I had become a part of the leadership of that other ministry there is no way I could have helped start the support group!  So I didn’t get what I thought I wanted because God had something better in mind, even though I had to wait over a year to see what God had planned.  Think about THAT sometime.

I had a feeling today might not be a good day…

As I was getting ready for church this morning I began to have an uneasy feeling in my stomach that something bad was going to happen.  I don’t get these very often, but when I do I am rarely wrong.  The feeling grew.  Then as I walked down the steps I heard my almost 4-year-old say out of the blue, “I don’t like Mommy anymore.” 

I was stopped dead in my tracks.  Did I hear that right?  “What did you say?”  He repeated it AGAIN.  “WHY?”  I asked.  “Because you make loud sounds,” he replied, and my heart broke into a million pieces.

By “loud sounds” my son means yelling.  Yep.  Sometimes I yell.  I don’t want to.  But sometimes I get so tired and frustrated and I just, just… GAAHHH!  I hate it when I get like that.  (See The Mom I Do Not Want to Be)  And now to see that it has changed my son’s opinion of me makes me feel awful.  Truly awful.  I went to church with a sinking heart, eager for wisdom and comfort.

I wish I could say that the day got better from there.

Steven Curtis Chapman on “Larry King Live” 8/7, 9pm ET

Here is a thoughtful article from CNN.com about the Chapman family, their loss, and their heart for adoption.  Our Tragedy and God’s Love for Orphans.

Steven painted a beautiful image of adoption’s spiritual symbolism: “My wife and I had always supported the idea of adoption, and as Christians, we understood the importance of loving and caring for others. But what I had not yet grasped was that adoption is a physical picture of what Jesus has done for me. I did nothing to deserve God’s love; in fact, I was living as an orphan, without hope. Yet God chose to pursue a relationship with me, and through the death of his son Jesus, I was adopted into God’s family.”

Steven will be on Larry King Live tonight to talk about their grief and their faith.  I rarely watch TV, but I will tonight!

Little Maria was killed in a tragic accident in the driveway of the family home. Organizations like Kids and Cars strive to raise safety awareness and help prevent further non-traffic vehicular incidents.  Another wonderful non-profit is  Annabelle’s Angels,  started by a family who tragically lost their child in a backover accident.  I highly encourage you to read more about blind spots and Rear Safety awareness.

Previous posts on the Chapman Family:

Maria Sue Chapman

Memorial Service for Maria Sue Chapman

Day 3 ROCKED!

 

 

 

 

 

Gus had a very good day today at Vacation Bible School.  My goopy eye and me, not so much.  Well, it was overall a good day but we had a rough start.  I woke up exhausted and waaaay too early because my oldest decided to get up at 5:30am.  And then there was that pesky goopy eye issue, although I was VERY good about not touching my eye and spreading infection to other people.  But EVERYONE felt the need to comment on it.  “Why is your eye red?”  “Wow, your eye is really red!”  “Did you know your eye was red?”   I felt like shouting, “UNCLEAN! UNCLEAN!” wherever I went.

Day 2 with Gus

So Wednesday of VBS began, Day 3 for me, Day 2 for Gus.  As excited as everyone still is I can begin to see that we are all tiring a bit.  I started the day wondering if I had handled Gus’s first day as well as I could have.  It is really important to me to be sensitive to him and make sure he has fun and feels comfortable, but did I coddle him TOO much?  I had made sure most of the activity leaders were aware of his situation and did other things to help smooth out his day- could he tell that I was treating him differently than the other children?  Did that bother him?  I had been shamed the day before when at pickup I had started to talk to Gus’s mother about his day with him standing there.  I said, “He had a pretty good day”, and she said, “Honey, go wait for me over there.”  She wanted him to NOT feel different or like we were talking about him as if he was a non-person.  I respected that.  After all, he is not the Autistic Boy.  He is a boy who also has Autism.  Was I focusing too much on the Autism and not the boy?

VBS/ Inclusion In a Church Setting

I am smack dab in the middle of a week of Vacation Bible School at my church.  Quite a circus, 500-plus kids, loads of volunteers.  And in a setting like this it can often be a challenge to provide inclusion for children with special needs. 

I have two preschool-age boys who have some Sensory Integration issues, and one of them seems to be on the Autism Spectrum (he receives therapy and we are in the process of getting him evaluated).  I was worried how they would cope with all the activity and new experiences.  Thankfully they have done quite well.  I was able to have a long talk ahead of time with Percy’s teacher and fill her in on some of his unique characteristics: what his sign-language motions are, what to do when he bangs his head, when he eats things that are are not food, when his hits himself, when he hits someone else, etc.  But aside from brief kicking tantrums at dropoff the first 2 days he has been wonderfully frustration-free!  Thomas has also done well and didn’t even find the videos scary (I had been worried, they were about a mad scientist in a secret lab… it really does tie in to God somehow).  He has not eaten the snack yet due to his sensitivity to certain textures but he also has not complained.  I talked with his teacher and we agreed to NOT offer him an alternative.  Either he eats the snack he is given or he waits to eat at HOME.  Maybe by the end of the week he will be ready to try something new.  I will say though that after today’s session they were both quite crabby.  I think everyone is getting a little overstimulated, including ME!

I am teaching a team of eleven 2nd and 3rd graders, and semi-assisting with the three other teams the same age.  All together we have about 40 in our group.  They switched me at the last minute to that age because there was a child with EXTREME food allergies to almost EVERYTHING.  They knew I am all too familiar with how to use an EPI-Pen.  I have one because my son is frighteningly allergic to animals.  He turns into ONE.BIG.HIVE.  Scary.  I am also very used to food allergies because my nephew dealt with that for years and I had to watch what I gave him.   Anyway, the mother called me the night before Day 1 to fill me in.  I thought that was very responsible of her.  Her son brings his own snack every day to VBS.  It has to be frightening for a mother to send her child out of her hands into a setting full of volunteers where he can potentially be exposed to something that can harm him. 

That switch from 4th to 2nd must have been divine intervention, because it put me in place to have a huge blessing on day two when I was introduced to a new boy I’ll call Gus.  I was told he had Autism (albeit high-functioning) and they put him in my group thinking I would be the most sensitive.

My arm’s not broken! / Peace and Calm- Part II

As I wrote in the post Peace and Calm (important background for these musings), life was quite recently out of control.  And I kinda LOST control.  But I decided, in the midst of an excessive crying fit, that this was just how life was supposed to be.  I really wished for a BREAK in the tumult, yet I knew realistically that a respite just wasn’t gonna happen very often.  But I would find the strength to cope SOMEHOW, if I just asked for help.  I felt the presence of God that night and slowly my emotions began to settle.  But, as I wrote previously, “Little did I know that soon my rediscovered sense of peace and calm would be tested yet again.”  (Cue the foreboding music… Dum da DUMMM…)