Assignment for day 1 – write a little bit about yourself and what you intend to do with your blog.
As I set up a WordPress account several years ago with the intention of helping others with special needs kids navigate through the daunting challenges of raising them and keeping the family together through that, and as I never got past the initial set up, I decided to jump into blogging in a serious way by signing up for a WordPress class on blogging. No cost, but a sense of commitment and I’ll ask people who I don’t know essentially hold me accountable to this now long overdue task of getting this thing off the ground.
So much has happened since that blog setup and all those good intentions. Good thing I did not start it when I thought I would as we’ve been through so much more and seen so many more things that I think are worth sharing. And I’ve not got over two years under my belt of ALMOST daily postings to family and an ever expanding circle of friends via SMS and e-mail. The theme of those posting are always short (gotta fit within a single “mega” SMS message), and most often (hopefully) inspiring. Many who receive those have told me I should one day publish them (I’ve been gathering them over on GoogleDocs for the moment) and that my timing is often “inspired”, “amazing”, or a number of other adjectives that tell me I must be onto something.
So with that, I begin.
I’m old enough to have grandchildren, and though we have none yet they are hopefully just around the corner with the up coming marriage of our two oldest now very adult children. Though they are special, they do not have the special needs of our youngest, who’s premature birth and subsequent years of numerous challenges from that and a nasty infection with a virus that makes German Measles look mild. In any case, she changed all of our lives from that point forward. We learned enough from her and each other to fill whole books, but I’ll settle for hoping to pass on what we’ve found indispensable to our journey, where we’ve learned to move from survival mode to thrive mode. The transformation started from one of complete and total desperation in the early years to one of confidence and trust that most everything works out, particularly as one learns to let go.
But more on that later. For now,. let’s just say the more I write the more enthusiastic I am getting about this project of mine and what might come of it. Time will tell.
Now onto my three year old commitment to let others in on our family secret to hope and evidence of how what we’ve discovered works in the midst of some pretty dire circumstances as we all moved from bad to worse to almost complete devastation to looking forward to what each day brings and the joys we get to share with each other and the celebrations that have come along that way. You look at things differently than you ever would have thought possible.
My hope is to bring some of that into the light.
Learning to run (with a multiply-handicapped child) 