The Chaos and the Clutter

Special Needs Parenting

How Do You Qualify “Busy”?

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I have seven children.  Three or maybe four of them have Special Needs.  I am an adoption advocate.  I am a writer.  I run an adoption website.  I homeschool.  I am a blogger.  I have a medically fragile child who requires a lot of care.  I am a wife.  I am a daughter, an aunt, a friend.  I cook.  I bake.  I do the meal planning and the shopping.  I used to be a scrapbooker and a reader!  I think that most would not argue with me that I am busy.

But the thing is, I was busy when I had two kids.  Back then, I had a sick baby and my body was recovering from a difficult pregnancy and I was nursing and getting up at night and my husband was a full time student and I babysat and held craft sales and sold scrapbook supplies and held workshops at our house to try to bring in some extra money.  Man, was I busy!

And then when I had four kids (because we were foster parents, we pretty much jumped over three!), I had fostering paperwork and case conferences and four kids and Bible study and foster parent training courses.  I was busy!

And then when we had five kids (three through fostering), my oldest was five and I had two three year olds and an eight month old and a four month old and I used to go for walks pushing the double stroller wearing a baby in a backpack carrier or a Snugli and wow, then I was REALLY busy!

And then we went down to only three kids for awhile and at first, I felt like I had all the time in the world!  I read; I scrapbooked; I took baths; I threw the most awesome parties for my kids’ birthdays.  But I began to fill in my time…I started homeschooling.  I began leading a women’s Bible study and I took extra courses and before long, we had taken another few kids and then, I turned around one day and we had (including fostering) six kids with four of them in diapers!!!  Ok, I was finally really busy!

And then we fluctuated here and there but mostly had four or five kids and we started adopting some of our former foster kids and there was a lot of paperwork involved with that and we moved two times in one year (not my idea!) and our sweet Granola Girl was born and came to us as an awesome surprise with just a few hours notice and then we were suddenly parents to six, our five and our beloved long-term foster son.  And he had appointments, many, many appointments and Granola Girl didn’t sleep through the night until she was 17 months old and we had our house for sale and I had to try to keep it clean for showings and I was The Husband’s assistant in his work and it’s a wonder I didn’t go crazy, because I was really busy!

And then we helped transition our foster son to his forever family, we moved to an acreage, and could almost breathe a sigh of relief.  Except that that was about the time Miss Optimism’s health issues came to light and a few months later, we found out that Einstein had Aspergers and The Husband was going through some career changes and we were in the middle of pursuing an international adoption!  Are we nuts?!  Oh, and we were renovating to add bedrooms and the house flooded three times and…I was busy!

And then I was homeschooling five kids and the kids were a bit older so we were no longer getting up in the night with them or changing diapers, but we were driving them to activities and friends’ houses and the oldest to his job and then we got the phone call that we had been referred siblings, a boy and a girl from Ethiopia.  Now, I was busy!

And then before we could even catch our breath, our adoption agency went bankrupt and we had to rush over to Ethiopia and in the blink of an eye, we had seven kids!  And two of them spoke no English and had experienced a lot of trauma and had a hard time adjusting.  I was driving to play therapy and pulmonary specialists and the hospital and art classes and The Husband was driving to hockey and Cadets and soccer and their work and his work and my mom was driving them to swimming lessons while I did laundry with just two of the kids home those few hours every week.  I was homeschooling kids with Special Needs and kids who spoke no English and one in Junior High and we put our oldest in school and I don’t know how we made it through but we did, but we were busy!

Busy is relative.  Busy forces changes like finding systems that work.  My friend Tracy says that if you need something done, ask a busy person because they are more likely to say “yes” and figure out a way to make it happen!

See, the thing is that I have friends who just have one or two kids, but they have an aging parent that they are caring for or are juggling a career and being a single mom or are battling a chronic illness themselves.  They are busy!  I mean, really, really busy.

Whatever your circumstances are, chances are, you are busy.  You are filling your time with the things that matter to you, the things that you have to do to meet your needs and those around you.  You don’t need to qualify your busyness against someone else’s.

I know that in our society, we are programmed to think that we have to be busy, but at the same time, that being busy is a burden.  I get trapped in that way of thinking sometimes too, but when I really sit back and think about it, my being busy is a blessing.  It means that there are others in my life.  It means that I matter to people (even if sometimes it feels like I only matter because I feed them and clean up after them!).  It means that I am of able body and somewhat sound mind.  It means that I have.  If I did not have (gifts God has given me, children, a husband, friends, extended family, money for food, a house to clean, passions), I would not be busy.  And that is not the life for me.

So today, I am embracing my busyness.  I am going to find the blessings in it.  There are a multitude.

Denial

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Denial can be a beautiful thing.  You can choose to believe what you want to believe.  But when the something you believe isn’t true, there is always going to be that undercurrent, those unsettling feelings, that quiet voice in your mind that whispers the truth.  In my experience, the whispers tend to get louder and can turn into screams.  And then you are forced to confront the truth…the thing that you have known all along.

What am I talking about?  I am talking about this thing that most parents of special needs kids do at one time or another.  We tell ourselves that our child just needs more time to catch up or that the obvious differences between our child and their peers are not a good indicator of where our child is at because we don’t want to face the truth.  Facing the truth is painful.  Admitting that there is a problem is hard.

As parents, we want our kids’ lives to be the best they can be, for their futures to be limitless.  Acknowledging that there will be struggle and hardship up ahead, more so than just for the average person is not something that is easy to do.

I have walked this road twice before.  When we first admitted to ourselves that it was time to have Miss Optimism assessed for what we knew was a neurodevelopmental disorder, it was very hard to take those initial steps.  Then, hearing her diagnosis (even though it was EXACTLY what we knew it would be) caused grieving.  We grieved for the life we would have wished for her.  We grieved knowing of the additional struggles she would face.  We even grieved for what we would lose.

When we first realized that Einstein had Aspergers, we grieved again.  One thing that made his diagnosis easier is that that time, we didn’t have to wrestled with whether or not we wanted him assessed and “labelled”, something we had wrestled with for hours in regards to Miss Optimism.  We had been through that part once before and knew that we wanted to follow through with the assessments.  But admitting that our child would possibly be ridiculed and made to feel different just broke my heart as a mother.

You would think that by the third time, I would just be able to move forward and get on with things, but I have had the hardest time this time.  I went through a period of “why me?”.  I questioned whether God knew what He was doing when He placed another special needs child with us.  Did He not know that this would be more than I could handle?!  And then that questioning led to some peace.  I know that He knows that I can handle this.  I am not yet in a place where I believe it yet, but I know that I am just going to have to trust in Him for now.  And for now, that is enough.

So we stand here again.  I spent a long time on that lonely road of denial.  I thought that surely having two special needs kiddos meant that I could not have another!  Surely I was entitled to special consideration!  It was excruciatingly painful to have to admit that it was not only possible that we had three special needs kids, but it was fact.

It took courage and a lot of prayer for me to first pick up the phone and start phoning around about getting assessments done for Dancing Queen.  We had the first assessment on Monday.  The result?  Severe speech delay in seven of the eight categories they tested and possible auditory problems.  One diagnosis down, two or three more to go.  We suspect that we know what all the results will be.  We suspect we know the labels that will be written about her on paper, though we know from experience now that those labels need not define her.

And even though this first diagnosis of a severe speech delay is a small one, I did cry to see it in black and white.  I will probably shed a few tears when our next suspicions are confirmed as well.  I’d like to say that because I’ve walked this road two other times, that I know that things will get better, but I’m still in that painful stage.  I think about the appointments that are in the near future: speech therapy for her and for Granola Girl (did I forget to mention that Granola Girl was diagnosed with a moderate speech delay on Monday?!) once or twice a week each, one to two appointments a week for Miss Optimism’s lungs, one to two therapy appointments a week for Dancing Queen, further assessments, and the usual dental, doctor, etc. for all the kids and it just feels too overwhelming.

Right now, I’m in a bit of a feeling-sorry-for-myself phase.  I wish that I could stay in bed, curled up under the covers all day and have a good cry, but I have a daughter who is struggling to breathe and another who is confronting past trauma and severely delayed and a son working on healthy attachment and another going through some teenage issues and three more kids who need me too in their own ways and so I get up every morning and I put one foot in front of the other and remind myself to be thankful for each one of them…and I am.

Dollar Store Sensory Bin

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Sensory bins can be great fun for kids of all ages.  Though normally used for Preschoolers and kids with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD), the bins are a big hit with all of my kids.  Four of my kids have SPD so I make them every week, but they can get expensive. Yesterday, I visited the dollar store and picked up these items:

feather boa, cork coasters, brightly coloured scouring pads, sponges, non-slip pads, sandpaper, squishy balls, textured ball, netting, coloured corrugated cardboard

I paired those items up with things from around the house such as a beaded necklace, tin foil, bubble wrap, cotton balls, buttons, screws, rocks, beads, plastic leaves, dry pasta, sequins, velcro, and a few toys to make a sensory bin.

The bin ended up costing about $11 to make and most of the items can be re-purposed or re-used in future sensory bins.

You can find other great sensory bin ideas in my book and by following my Sensory Bins board on Pinterest.

 The Ultimate Guide to Sensory Bins