Today’s Victory: Pants

I want to take a second to remind everyone to celebrate the victories. As Autism and Special Needs Parents, we're all to aware that even the smallest step forward still means forward movement. Focus on those victories, even on the really bad days because it helps to maintain perspective. That being said, I want to share a victory we celebrated yesterday and again today. It may not seem like a big deal to the uninitiated but trust me when I say, this is huge. For the first time in as long as I can remember, Emmett has worn a different pair of pants to school. This has been a nightmare and we have not been able to find a pair of pants that he will wear to school, other than…

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I need your help. Please take a second and read this post

I've been working to raise awareness for people with Autism and their families for over a decade. I do so by sharing our story in a very open, honest and transparent way. I've also been providing a free support forum for families to join and seek comfort, guidance and advice from other people who've been there. While the My Autism Help Forums have been down since I moved to a new server. I've created a new, smaller, easier to use support forum and it can be found here. It's totally free and all you have to do is register to this blog to gain complete access. You can do that in the right side bar or the footer at the bottom of this page. Now comes the point where I…

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Praying I wake up to good news

We never got Gavin's lab results and I'm struggling with that tonight. His numbers have gone from dangerously low to sort of okay and back to dangerous in a matter of days. There's a chance it was lab error but which one was in error? Was it the sorta better results or the dangerously low results? This is the question I've been asking myself since last week. The only way to have a better idea of which is accurate is to add more data to the equation. If these results come back and his numbers are low, we know that it's likely correct. If they come back sorta okay, we know that will likely be correct. The more data points we can add, the better picture we have of what's…

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Hey Dad, You Need A Good Night’s Sleep Too!

This is a collaborative post and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of this author of this blog.   Every forum, every article, and every new Mom talks about how hard it is to have a baby and deal with sleep deprivation. No matter where you look, there are guides for a new Mom and how she can catch up with sleep during the day because, at night time, she’s breastfeeding and not sleeping very much at all. Here’s the thing: everyone forgets about Dad. If you are the sort of man who believes that you’ve experienced fatigue because of the latest stag do, you are very sorely mistaken. Dad’s may have ineffectual nipples that the baby doesn’t want, and Dad may have a job to get to…

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Special Needs Parenting – What it feels like to watch your kids suffer

I've been working for almost a decade to help people better understand what Special Needs Parents go through. Whether it's Autism, ADHD or even fragile health, there's a story to be told and insight to be gained by reading it. Every family's experience can and will be different. Even families dealing with the same diagnostic challenges can and will experience different problems, even though their kids share the same diagnosis. I wanted to attempt to explain what it feels like having to powerlessly watch my kids suffer. The most recent experience I've had, I'm stilling actively living through, and it's in regards to Emmett. Emmett has been living with a very rare fever disorder known as PFAPA. The disorder means that Emmett runs idiopathic fevers. Idiopathic means that the fevers…

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Dry air makes it so hard for me to sleep

I had a rough time sleeping last night. Majority of the problem was related to the air being so dry, it made me really stuffy and that always makes it hard for me to sleep. It's like a fricking desert. Around 2 AM I ended up downstairs on the couch. Its easier to breathe down there for some reason. I need to put the humidifier on the second floor because that should make a difference. I didn't end up fall asleep with Ruby curled up next to me. Thankfully, the boys are at Lizze's parents house, so I was able to sleep in. Gavin didn't need anything this morning and I wasn't disturbed. All we have to do today is take Lizze to the dentist, get stuff for the boys…

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Doing right by Gavin for his 18th birthday isn’t as easy as it sounds

Gavin will turn eighteen in a few days. To be honest, that's a pretty big deal for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that he's physically made it to eighteen and I say that because of his fragile health. He's had some close calls over the years and there were times we weren't sure we would ever see this day. Instinctively, we want to make a huge deal out of this day. We want Gavin to have the best birthday of his life thus far. There are so many things that Gavin will never be able to celebrate. Things like high school graduation, getting his driver's license, going to college and truly living on his own. As much as we want to through a huge party for him…

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