A little piece of heaven

I find that I prefer not to blog if I don’t have something good or helpful to say. Last night a friend suggested that I should write anyways, that people don’t just want to hear the good. I hope she’s right.

Nathan’s Dynavox is down. Nothing happens after I press the power button. I had to send it in for repair to Mayer Johnson, which is a total bummer. Repairing it will take some time, and let’s not even talk about the cost. It happened right when we were teaching him to use the internet and he was really enjoying it (more on that later).

I feel down. The last 5 months have gotten to me. I am often sad. Yesterday was one of those days. I’d managed to keep Gryffing content while I got Nathan ready for school. Then I had to get Izzy ready for school, and that’s when Gryffin exploded. While I changed her he was in his crib screaming. The stress got to be too much and I burst into tears. So Izzy looks at me and hugs me and says, “Mommy, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”. Which of course made me cry even more. So she says “Don’t cry mommy don’t cry”. And then she starts crying. So there we were, Izzy and I holding each other and crying, Gryffin in his crib screaming, fortunately Nathan was already en-route to school. It broke my heart.

My halloween pictures are down too. I waited too long to take pictures, and by the time I did Izzy was in full breakdown mode. I made the mistake of using the auto mode on the camera so they didn’t come out so well. So here they are:

They say that once you have a dog, adding another is barely noticeable. You walk them at the same time, feed them at the same time, they keep each other company and entertain each other.

Call me crazy but I thought having kids was a little bit like that.

Instead I am finding out the truth – it’s a lot more like the Richter scale. For every child, you have 10 times more work.

Add to that special needs, newborn, and high needs to single motherhood (Owen and I separated a few months ago), and watch as your day disappears between their needs.

To that, add the need for money, and there goes the rest of your day (fortunately I can work from home).

And finally, add to all that the need for sanity, which translates into a little bit of meditation, journaling, and exercise on a daily basis, and every day you end up in the red.

So for all of you to whom I owe emails, text messages, or phone calls – I am genuinely sorry, I wish I had that precious resource called time. I think I pretty much owe everyone I know something – a phone call, text or email – but I simply can’t get to everything. Please forgive me.

It’s all their fault:

It was 8:23 and we were 8 minutes late for the bus. The day had started in chaos, with Isabelle refusing to shower and get ready to go to preschool and Nathan refusing to eat his breakfast. So I was late for the bus, and stressed. Then Gryffin woke up and started screaming at the top of his lungs. I could feel the tension like tight rippling through my body.

I parked Nathan just outside the door in his wheelchair, hit the brake, and started running upstairs to grab Gryffin and bring him out with me to load Nathan on the bus. I took a few steps up the stairs and something told me to look back. I looked out the door and saw Nathan’s wheelchair rolling down the little hill of our front lawn, towards the street. I jumped down and ran towards him.

It all happened in slow motion. I ran with all my might trying to catch him before he fell off the curb, but gravity won and I didn’t make it. Nathan, chair and all, fell off the curb. A little bit of glue and tons of traumeel later, he is back to his smiling self.

His face is broken. My heart is broken. You think you can protect your disabled kid at least from something like this. Turns out you can’t.