Category Archives: Family Life

This week, I’m the whiner…

It’s true. And I hate, despise, and abhor being the whiner. I’m busy…like really busy. I home school my 11 year old. I take care of Jack and his daily routine of medications, tube feedings, and breathing treatments. I teach two night classes–one of which has a clinical component. For the next 2 weeks I…

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Staying Sane While Raising a Bipolar Child

She stomps out of the room, each firmly-planted step shaking the floor. Tear-stained, she plunges her face into the pillows on her bed, where she screams and cries. As she starts to calm down, I feel the adrenaline retreating into the places from which it flooded my body. Breathing, relaxing myself, I tend to her…

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Complacent?

I scrambled up the hill to my daughter’s “old school” to pick up my son from his “new class.” My daughter attended this school from Early Intervention through Kindergarten before being moved to our neighborhood school for first grade. I know most of the Early Intervention staff pretty well, and I know the IEP process…

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How to Relax and Get Off Life’s Raging Rapids

You know when a speaker is sharing a great story with an audience, and they reveal a lesson learned…. and you’re sitting there thinking What?? I got something completely different out of that! That’s me too. Maybe it’s just because we live life from a different angle as special needs parents. Whatever the reason, while…

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Thank YOU!

You know who you are… your the mom that most can’t relate to, the mom that takes her job seriously. The mom that’s misunderstood more than understood. The one that stands up for what’s right and wrong. The one that is the child’s first teacher and strongest advocate. You are the REAL EXPERT of your child….

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Friendship Road

Since we’re walking through another season of learning curve, this time related to my mother-in-law’s needs, I have been realizing again the importance of friends…and not just any friends, but friends who really know what you are going through. For us, this is not just people who have taken care of an aging parent, but…

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A lesson in strengthening a marriage

I think about the changes in our marriage. How I personally viewed it, treated it…not as I do now. Time has given me new perspective. The challenges we’ve faced have forced the change to be. There were times I thought he was just too crabby. Not having a good outlook, too negative, refusing to see…

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Our Role & words hurt

So I was thinking, draw 3 circles on a piece of paper. One inside the other, so really you have 3 cirles around each other(as pictured)   The inner circle is our children, this is their culture of being a child with special needs. The middle circle is us, the parents. We’re not in the…

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Neighborhood Friends

One of the things I love about our neighborhood is all the kids on the street. It’s reminiscent of when I was a kid and would run the neighborhood from morning till dusk, riding my bike or roller skating or playing a neighborhood game of hide and seek. True things are a little different now….

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learning…

Learning…I’ve not written about homeschooling yet so I thought maybe this would be a good time. Homeschooling isn’t so typical for us, we have many challenges to get over. We do use therapies as part of our daily routine (even if we are still on sabbatical from professional therapies at our local hospital). We do…

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