Life is an Adventure

I've been meaning to write this blog post for awhile now but it hasn't quite taken shape enough for me to commit to writing it until yesterday.  I was driving back from a small farm on the other side of town, the views were spectacular and the sky as blue as it gets.

A few weeks ago my husband came home and not being able to resist the temptation I greeted him with these words: "Hi Love!  I just met some Russian guy over the internet and I'm meeting him in a parking lot tomorrow so I can buy some eggs from him!"  Needless to say, he just about had a heart attack.

But impulsive me went ahead.  As I arrived at the designated spot, I texted two of my friends to tell them what I am doing and if I don't text them in 10 minutes, something went wrong.  I mean, come on!  How many movies have you seen?  My action movie setup where they kidnap me and my son and turn us into assassins had a different kind of exciting conclusion and I paid $20 for 4 dozen of the most beautiful farm eggs you have ever seen.  They are brown and all differently shaped, some crazy big and others long and narrow.  The yolks were bright orange and coloured the scrambled eggs a nice dark yellow instead of the regular almost white we have come to expect from our eggs.  I loved these babies.

After about two weeks my egg supply was running on low and I had to reluctantly buy store eggs again.  The husband seemed slightly relieved to find small white eggs in the basket on the counter instead of my adventure eggs.  He voiced his concern about my "black market eggs" as he called them at the office and one of his co-workers assured him that the produce market in Canada is more of an off-white colour.  This helped him feel a little better but he made me promise there will be no more Russian eggs.

I broke that promise.  A few days ago my Russian friend called to see if I wanted more eggs.  I couldn't say no!  What kind of mother would I be if I fed my kids regular eggs instead of farm fresh, free range eggs when they are not overly priced and so easy to come by?**  So this time instead of heading out to the parking lot, I head out to their small little farm.

I followed Google Maps like the good little navigator I am.  The trail kept going up into the wild where the road no longer has two lanes and signs to watch for wildlife were everywhere.  It was spooky.  I kept thinking that I should probably have told someone where I was going but was too scared to pull over so I can send a text.  The further I went, the thicker the woods became and I could see fewer and fewer homes.  This time we were not looking at an action movie, this is straight low budget horror movie stuff.

And all of a sudden I found a small cul-de-sac with garbage and recycling bins out for pickup day and a row of lovely neat homes.  Most painted a cheerful white with blue trim.  Absolutely stunning.  Once more my horror movie didn't quite pan out (to my relieve!) but I drove away with several dozen eggs and the most amazing views of the countryside.  Going back down that once scary road there was now a lovely sunny drive where I soaked in all the wonder around me.  I was in awe of this life and the experiences we are handed and my eggs.

Life is truly an adventure, every day is a new story being written.  Our stories are sometimes dramatic and other times quite comedic.  Sometimes we live through a fearful or heartbreaking story but we should never forget that there is adventure in there somewhere.  We just have to embrace the adventures and live them when they cross our paths.  Even when you are scared or would much rather stay in the safety of your home, a short walk out the door could just be the adventure the doctor ordered.

** Disclaimer:  I have no problem if you feed your kids regular eggs, I do it all the time.  But I am also really good at lying to myself to justify doing things I probably should not be doing.  So please be a good parent and feed your kids whatever you feel they should eat and ignore me and my hopefully temporary idiocy because feeding my kid a chocolate chip cookie for dinner seemed totally reasonable last night.

Home

Home is where the heart is.  But the human heart is boundless.  It is deep and broad and strong and fragile all at the same time.  It can break and heal, have scars and walls and nooks and crannies and all the love in the world.  The heart knows endless love, even when our smarts try to tell us otherwise.

Is it possible to have more than one home?  Can the human heart love that much?  I believe so.

For me, there is the home I was raised in.  The home where I learned to love, live and trust.  The home where I learned right from wrong and how to stand and walk this earth and just be me.  Where I shared my forming thoughts and feelings with those people who guided my footsteps on their path right into this great big world.  It is the place where I want to go when I am sad, to this day.  I want to hop on a plane and crawl into my mother's bed at dawn and just lie there until the world is a kinder place.

There is also the home I was so glad at first to leave behind because it no longer suited our needs. I came to realize I miss deeply.  I miss the familiarity.  I miss the short hallway and the tiny kitchen and the massive den where numerous craft projects have begun and most have died before they saw the light of day.  We truly started our lives together there, having moved in mere months after our wedding.  Both our babies were brought home to that light apple green room with the Peter Rabbit quilt, the white-wash-turned-paint rocking chair and the massive Winnie the Pooh on the wall that was still visible after layers of paint and primer.  It's one paw still completely missing the mark and somehow attached to its thigh.

The memories, good and bad, are all precious.  They are what makes it my home.  Someone else's mail gets delivered there now, but it is still my home.

We have started building a new home now.  The house stands, it was built in the early 90's, but the home is not quite there yet.  It will take awhile, but with every vegetable or shrub I have planted, my own roots have started shooting here.  With every book I unpacked, a little part of my soul moved in.  One by one my paintings, portraits and pictures are finding nails in the walls where they will rest, keeping watch over this new story being written.

And so my heart grows deeper, ever expanding to make room for the new home, the new love and all the new experiences it is bound to have.  It will keep growing with every new day and every new adventure, however small it may be, my heart will grow.  Sure, it will crack and break and take one hell of a beating every now and then, because we are human after all and sometimes we get hurt.  But as fragile as our hearts can be, they can heal and grow and love even more.  All we need to do is give it the chance.

Finding Balance

It is hard juggling two children.  I can only imagine how hard it must be to maneuver more than two.  But it isn't the day to day stuff that is all that hard.  It is exhausting changing so many diapers and running after more than one toddler.  That part is tiresome but not hard.

What is hard is finding balance.  Giving both children what they need emotionally, educationally, spiritually.  That part gets to be a little more tricky.

The main reason for our recent big move was to find services for the eldest Whirlwind.  Where we were staying we seemed to have to jump through so many hoops to find appropriate services and then still end up with nothing to show for it and it was going to eat up the Autism funding we get for the year way before the year is even close to being over.  So many closed doors.  And to be fair, it's not that there weren't options, there were just too many needy children who required all the services.  Our son is one of the needy kids but with a more recent diagnosis, he is way at the bottom of the pile.  Waiting lists are evil.

We decided to make the move and enrolled him in an amazing program where they specialize in Applied Behaviour Analysis but also have speech, occupational therapy and Supported Child Development all under one roof.  It was amazing.  But for the last six months we have had to drive the 60 kilometers in three times a week.  And that meant that the little brother had to tag along.

At first it wasn't a problem, he was only 18 months at the time and napped all the way there and most of the ride back again.  When Whirlwind is at the center, we would go grocery shopping or visit grandma who lives close by.  We were doing great and I told myself I can do this, no problem.  The driving is a piece of cake.  But then the baby became a running, playing, still not talking toddler who only took one nap a day and it wasn't all that long.  Still, we tried.  We went to the park to burn of some energy, still visited grandma where he could play and build puzzles and every so often we just went for a walk and played around the center until the whirlwind was done.

One evening, however, a certain little teething toddler wasn't doing so well.  He was upset and hurting.  Sleep was not an option.  I stayed up with him until the early morning hours when he finally passed out.  He slept and slept and slept.  Such amazing peaceful sleep after such a hard night.  But it was therapy day.  He woke right before we were to leave.  It was a hard day.  He spent the whole day driving there and back again with us.  My heart broke at the thought that he finally got a chance to move and play at 3 that afternoon for the first time.  Just because of one rough night.

We tried to find him a daycare but it seems daycares here are as rare as autism intervention services where we used to live.  I felt guilty.  Every time I strap him into his car seat I felt the pangs of guild.  This is not where a two year old should be.  He should be playing and exploring.  We have this great fenced backyard with a large sandpit, vegetable plants and even a playhouse with swings and a tube slide.  He should be learning about the world.  Not learning how to sit and look at the trees and the lake as it zooms by.  It is gorgeous, but not very stimulating.

It hit my like a ton of bricks that everything we have done the last few years have been around what the whirlwind needs.  We moved because that is what he needed and even though it has done the whole family good, the whole family wasn't the motivation.  We plan our days around his brother's therapy sessions and bedtime (or lack thereof) and it had to stop.

It is time we change focus.  The boys need equal from us.  One can't always just bring in the rear because his brother has a little paper that says "Autism Spectrum Disorder" on it.  He is also not talking yet and even though he is on the waiting list for services and we are working on getting him all the appropriate help and resources, I can't ignore my gut telling me the main reason for his delay is because he has been bringing in the rear around here.  He is an absolute cuddle monster and spends most days on my hip and nights in my bed but lots of cuddling isn't going to get him talking.  It isn't going to stop him from lashing out and slapping me or others because he is so frustrated.  Being able to cuddle with my baby-not-a-baby is amazing and I treasure every moment, but it is not substitution for playing, reading or singing.

We are changing centers for the Whirlwind's intervention services.  Whether he will be better off there or not, I don't know.  But his brother need the chance.  He has to be given a fair shot where he can spend time with me and possibly other children where I can guide him and share the world with him without running after his brother who is determined to scale every wall, every fence and break every lock. You see?  Even when my thought are about him, they still run back to the whirlwind. It has to stop.

This is neither fair nor easy.  Finding the balance between two kids is hard.  Where one kid needs more than the other we sometimes tend to skew the balance.  Not taking away from other kids when one needs so much more is sometimes impossible, but we have to try.

My words

So much has happened in the last few months and blogging had to take a backseat.  I'll be honest, I've been in a love-hate relationship with blogging lately.  I often thought of just deleting it all and pretending it never happened.  I didn't want to admit defeat and most definitely felt as if I had been beaten.  I couldn't manage writing a single post for months and months.  As a matter of fact, I couldn't even think about the effort it would take or so much as a single topic that I wanted to write about badly enough.

But then I woke up this morning and decided not to get out of bed just yet.  My head was throbbing and having had very little sleep in the last week, my comfy king sized bed seemed to be the best place for me.  The kids are awake and running around the house (and watching Frozen for the millionth time) which meant for me that sleep is not an option.  Sleep will have to wait.  However, I can just lie here with the curtains drawn, and listen to "Let it Go" one more time.  But as not even Elsa can keep my attention for long and lets be clear on one thing: I can out-watch any little girl where Frozen is concerned.  So I turned to browsing news websites and give Facebook my due diligence and came upon this article: Harold Bloom: Preposterous 'Isms' Are Destroying Literature.

It is the first article in possibly weeks I have read from beginning to end.  I found it interesting even thought my knowledge of literature is minuscule to say the very least, it stirred a certain part of my brain and dare I say, my soul.  The part that loves words.  Beautiful words.  The part of me who loved 'God of Small Things' by Arundhati Roy not for the story or the social criticism, but for the beautiful words.  The words that moves your soul and makes you read a line over and over again.  Words that will stay with you for a lifetime.  They carve out a special place in your heart and sit there, waiting to be remembered, reread, quoted and most of all... waiting to change you.

Now here I am, back behind the keyboard.  Ready to face my own words again and share my life, my world and my thoughts with those of you who want to read about it.  I'm not a great writer, I didn't make literature my profession even though I did teach English for a few years.  But middle school English and my terrible English as a second language isn't the stuff legends are made of.  I can't remember basic grammar rules and spelling will kill me one day.  But I love words.  And I am willing to share the words I have with you, for the good or the bad.

  

I Will Love Myself

A while back I embarked upon a quest.  A weight-loss quest.  Diets have been my constant companion for so many years, I find it hard not to embark upon one.  But this time, I told myself, this time it will be successful.  This time I'm doing it for my husband.  I love him like crazy and against everything I know about diets and healthy living, I was going to this for him.  He didn't ask me to, I took it upon myself.

Odd how I can still be so clueless.  It is not because I do not know that weight loss is all about balance.  It's about lifestyle change.  It's about eating to live, not living to eat.  I know all that.  Years of teaching Health and Career Education and Physical Education, I was the one preaching to girls why they should stay very, very far away from fad diets and steel themselves against the popular images of what we are expected to look like to be considered worthy.  I spent hours encouraging kids to not fall in these traps.  I guided them in their paths to a place where they stood a chance of choosing who they want to be, inside and out.  Not strive to be who public opinion wants them to be.

And here I was... Thinking those rules don't apply to me.  Maybe I just forgot.  Maybe I'm just so addicted to dieting that it became impossible for me to see what it was doing to me.

2015 has arrived and I am still overweight.  And you know what?  I made a resolution this year.  A resolution first and foremost to find happiness.  Which leads me straight to part two of my resolution: my new years resolution is to NOT diet this year.  This year will be the year I will learn to love my body.  I will learn to accept who I am and love it.  I will buy clothing that fits me now and not hold on to clothing I want to wear but I need to loose just a few pounds to fit into it.  I will buy pretty bras and get manicures and pedicures and maybe even have my hair died at a salon for a change (maybe...), but I will not diet.  I will not let my weight consume my thoughts and my opinions about myself.  I will start running again and maybe even take up yoga.  But I will not count calories.  I will not say no to the tasty french fries on my plate for lunch right now, just because I'm fat.  Nope, I will eat as many as I want.

I will enjoy my life.  I will enjoy my cooking and baking.  I will experiment in the kitchen and learn how to make new pastries (thanks to an awesome Christmas gift) while perfecting my macaroons.  There will be homemade pie, bread and pizza.  And love, lots of love.  Love I will pour into every cookie I bake and chicken pot pie devoured at my table.

There will be love, and I will love myself.  All of myself.

Everything Will Be Just Fine

We don’t always get the cards dealt to us that we want.  Sometimes life is quite cruel that way.  We really didn’t want the Whirlwind’s autism diagnosis.  We knew that’s what we got, but kept hoping that maybe, just maybe all the signs are wrong.  Maybe he’s just delayed and will catch up before we even knew it.

But, as life would have it, we were given a different set of rules than those we wanted.  And the crazy began.  I have felt the hopelessness deep inside me grow steadily over the last year and a half.  There has been a great sadness in my heart for everything that is and everything that isn’t and should have been.

But that has all changed.  I can’t help but feel like our world is finally turning around.  Even though winter is officially almost here and we’ve already hit freezing temperatures outside, spring has arrived within our family.  There is more than hope.

We found the most amazing autism center.  We went through the evaluation process and had our meeting today where we hammered out our goals and a plan of action.  Around the table we had his new occupational therapist, behavioural interventionist, senior behavioural interventionist, speech therapist and on skype we had the behavioural consultant.  We have a plan, people!  We have a plan!  No more guessing and wondering about what to do and what not.  This is it.  This plan is right.  I can feel it in my bones.  I just know that this is it.

This team right here is the first group of people who totally got it.  They know my son.  There have only been one other person outside of our immediate family who seemed to understand him this well.  He has seen tons of professionals in the Autism world and nobody gave me such an amazing feeling of confidence.  I know this is right.  I know he’ll be successful here.  

More importantly, I now know he’ll be successful at life.  He will make it.  I know it as certainly as I knew he had autism before his evaluation.  I’m not hoping he makes it in life, I know he will.  There is no need to hope for something that you know will happen for sure.  This will happen.  

He will be fine.  

We will be fine.  

Our family will be just fine...

F YOU AUTISM

Autism is a strange thing.  It can mean so much and so very little at the same time.  It can define a child, a family, a parent.  It can rule your life.  It doesn't matter what part you play within the family, it will shape who you are.

Autism is scary.  We know so very little of it while there are millions of words written on the subject.  So much money has gone into research and so much time.  Yet, we don't know a whole lot.  There are some universal 'truths' about autism that you find out very quickly is not so much a truth as a 'for most but not all' situation.  It's all shades of grey.  No black and no white.  That is scary as shit.  Knowing there are no hard lines.  No definitive answers.  The word 'spectrum' becomes a curse.

Autism makes you flexible.  Managing schedules, uprooting the family for better services, running out of a restaurant because we're having a melt-down?  Got that covered.  You need to be bendy.  Bendiness (even if it's not a real word) is a good skill to have.  It means the world can hit you with a ball of crap and you can keep on running while catching that shit and not only throwing it right back at the world, but gift-wrapping it somewhere in between.  No sweat.  Got this covered, thank you. With a pretty bow on top.

Autism teaches discipline.  You were never one for schedules and order?  Tough shit.  Get over it.  Be FLEXIBLE and learn a new skill.  Learn how to organize and stay organized.  Learn how to do bed time the same way every day at the same time.  So what if it takes you three years before you have any success?  Take comfort in the fact that something as simple as a trip to the store can throw things out of wack enough to make bedtime a catastrope and all the hard work null and void.  It'll only take another three years to get it right again.  No problem.

Now, this all seems very negative... Autism isn't all bad.  There is so much wonder and complete and utter awesome in this world that one only notices and is exposed to once you walk this road.  But that is a topic for another time and another post.

For now: FUCK YOU, AUTISM... I'm going to bed.  Go away.