January 7th, 2009 at 11:29 am (The Kids)
Kosette’s Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Watson, sent me an absolutely lovely piece of writing describing raising a special-needs child as taking a trip to Holland, when you had planned and packed for a trip to Italy. Read it. It’s wonderful and perfect in its simplicity.
Welcome To Holland
By Emily Pearl Kingsley
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 of 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! All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”
But there’s been a change in 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 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 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.
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January 6th, 2009 at 9:53 am (Current Events)
The Christmas Kham and I got engaged, his mother gave us a time-capsule ornament for the tree. We’ve decided to use it as a place to put our New Year’s Resolutions to be opened at decoration time to see how we did. So far, it has worked so far as to hang it on the tree. The premade form of questions pertaining to Christmas have remained blank for nearly 10 years now. Thus, we resolved this year to use the time-capsule ornament in the resolution capacity from now on.
Normally, I think of two resolution tops so there’s no failure, but once I started jotting down my thoughts, there were many. Some are BIGGIES, some are easy, some not-so-much, but all need to, and SHOULD be, done this year (because many already should have been). Maybe by writing them down and putting it out to y’all, I’ll be held more accountable, and follow through better.
Here is the list for resolutions for 2009:
- actually make resolutions and put in capsule
- Get 100,000 mile maintenance on car and fix things we’ve been putting off
- Back up computer (get necessary additional storage devices to do so) and finally rid ourselves of a virus that’s plagued us for over a year.
- take a couples dance class (salsa or basic swing, haven’t agreed yet)
- Go to the Portland Zoo
- Go to Barn Owl Nursery Herb and Lavender Farm in Wilsonville, OR especially for its Herb and Lavender Festivals
- Go to Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm in Woodburn, OR, especially for its Tulip Fest
- Go to Dancing Oaks Nursery in Monmouth, OR
- Explore Eugene
- See and Explore Portland, especially the Pearl District
- Go Camping as a family!!!
- Learn how to can/preserve/pickle to make better use of our garden’s harvest, especially tomatoes
- Take the kids blueberry and blackberry picking locally and make our own jam from our loot
- Read up on hard apple cider making process to see if we can turn our tree’s bounty into my 2nd favorite alcoholic beverage (champagne being #1)
- Rework our home loan into a fixed rate
- See a lawyer and draw up official will, living trust, and DNR orders
- Organize office paperwork
- Build shelving in the garage….then organize garage
- Sort through baby/toddler/maternity stuff
- Paint upstairs hallway
- Paint dining room tables and chairs
- Paint Kitchen
- Decide on whether or not to have one last child
- Make appointment for surgical correction from damage done from Kosette’s birth, if we decide not to
- Make appointment for Kham to get snipped if we decide Kellen is our last child.
- Get a puppy and focus on properly training it this year before Kellen starts Kindergarten if we opt for no more children.
- Got to IKEA in Portland
- Work more on genealogy and print out copies for immediate family
- Start recording oral history of “young” relatives
- MAYBE – an outlier – drive to Bend to visit Britton family and see the area?
- Make rough draft of Grandma Mildred children’s book idea
Ambitious? Yes. Doable. Yes. Will my/our lives be bettered by following through and making these things happen, and therefore, worth all of my time and energy? Absolutely. To give myself further incentive, I’m going to promise right here and now, to give my sister one dollar for every item not done come year’s end (except for #30, that one’s iffy). She’s getting married in November and could use a little extra something, even if it’s just a latte for when she’s getting her nails done on the big day. This’ll be a good test to see if she actually reads my blog too.
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