Our Every Day

I should be working on my free-lancing piece, but I felt compelled to blog because I haven't in a sweet forever. I just spent the last 45 minutes cleaning up my house that I have been cleaning up all day. I have been actively cleaning my house ALL day, but it doesn't matter - it's destroyed again just seconds later.  My kids are all asleep (wonder of wonders!) so it will stay clean for maybe 8 hours until it's a mess yet again. Often when things get loud and kids are screaming, I pop in my Air Pods and listen to a podcast to drown out the noise. As I was washing the soap out of Jovie's hair tonight in the bath while she angrily protested, one of the podcast hosts was talking about how he LOVES his life. LIKE HE LOVES HIS LIFE. He's got everything - the wife, the kids, the successful music career, and 90% of the time he can't believe that his life is this dream life.  I have moments like that. But mine fall more in the range of 10% of the time, I am living th...

I get nostalgic around this time every year.  Because it was about this time ten years ago that I found out I was expecting Grayson. On my 30th birthday, I went in for my first ultrasound and saw his precious little form on the screen.  Now I am going to be turning 40 in a few weeks, and he's going to be 10 this year. I truly believe that God was preparing me for autism long before Grayson's heart ever started to beat. And he used Grayson to prepare me for Easton - which is a story that maybe I will share somewhere down the road. I sit here and can think of probably a dozen times autism came across my radar screen - even as far back as childhood as I sat with my mom on the couch and we watched a little boy spin plates across the kitchen floor on some TV documentary. He had autism - but they said he was in his "own little world." Those words have stuck with me all these years. I remember thinking it sounded so scary. He was there in person but he wasn't with them m...

Weekends are when my house and life implode.  The only frame of reference of what weekends should be like with kids is my own childhood. And my own childhood was a sweet, simple time. On our weekends we went camping in our camper. We also took occasional day trips to Columbus to shop and go out to eat. Or we drove to Pennsylvania, Kentucky and sometimes New Jersey to see my grandparents and other family members. I remember the weekends we spent at home were really a time of rest and we did a lot of church activities on Sundays too. My parents may remember it differently! Ha ha :)  I know that's not everyone's experience. Maybe I am looking at my own childhood with a rose-colored filter. I know we had hard times too - but my parents just took it all in stride. Open heart surgery, cancer diagnosis, moves...some really hard stuff. But as a kid, I never felt the heaviness of it.  In short, my life right now with my kids is the very polar opposite of what I grew up with and wh...

Grayson loves bubbles. We go through gallons and gallons of solution each year - especially during the summertime where our bubble machine runs nearly non-stop. Our neighbors are all understanding of our situation, and thankfully they all love bubbles and often contribute with bubble solution! Living in a small town is funny because one day the bubble machine was going, and one of the garbage collectors who was running our neighborhood route texted me to tell me that the bubbles had filled our entire neighborhood. They hold a lot of meaning for us, because bubbles were used as the first thing in speech therapy to help us connect with Grayson. And then when we worked with our therapist through The Play Project. And when we brought Easton home from the hospital, Mike used bubbles to keep Grayson occupied. It was during one of those bubble playing moments that I first saw Grayson flap his hands in excitement. That's when I started wondering about autism. Fast forward nearly eight year...

It's a weird thing to feel compelled to share so much about our life because I absolutely love sharing while also hating it at the same time. I love it because just today two people stopped me at church to tell me that they have learned a lot and can relate quite a bit to what I share about our life. YES!!! This is what keeps me going! This is why I feel so called to write - I want people to become more aware of autism life, but I also really want to encourage others - that its okay to live and share authentically, that your story is important, that it is hard to parent a child with a disability and that you are not alone. But I hate it because lately, I have been getting feedback about a lot of things I am not saying.  So let me be clear because I believe clarity is kindness. This is what I AM saying: I am aware that all families have struggles.  I know that being a mother is the hardest thing in the world. I live that every single day for all of my children. I think that's p...

Survival mode. It's something that I know a lot of special needs parents live in on a daily basis - I am counted among that number. As your kids get older and out of toddler and preschool age, I think the expectation is that they are a little more self-sufficient. A little more independent. I see these skills emerging in Jovie - skills I have never really seen in Grayson and sometimes see in Easton who is affected more mildly by his version of autism. I look back to when I was Grayson's age, and I was able to do everything that Grayson and Easton even to some extent - cannot do. I could easily put my own socks and shoes on for starters. It's daunting to know that this is not something Grayson will ever outgrow. He'll change and develop as he gets older, but he will always be behind in very significant ways. He will always need constant care. He will always need to live with us or with a caregiver when we are too old to care for him. It's a fact.  His baby, toddler a...

Sometimes I focus a lot on what's going wrong in our little world. It's pretty much just our real life because if something wrong is going to occur, it will - and the timing will be terrible. Murphy's law and all that. But every once in a while, things are really great. The thing about autism parenting is that we experience a lot of silver linings - we find a lot of redemptive moments in the really hard day-to-day. An example: A few weeks ago, we missed the bus for school. It was crazy trying to get us all out the door, and I just knew we weren't going to make it to the bus so - I had to take Grayson to school that day. His para had been on vacation and he hadn't seen her since before Christmas. It was her first day back. When I took Grayson up to the door of the school, she was waiting for him. He was so thrilled to see her - I will never forget the look on his face, or the way she said, "I missed you!" She was just as excited to see him. He pressed his f...