A mom post today…
Late last year, during Down Syndrome Awareness week, I saw a picture that the CDSS (Canadian Down Syndrome Society) had posted to twitter of a bunch of their staff sporting these awesome CDSS temporary tattoo’s.
I sent a reply quickly, not thinking anything would come of it, asking where I could find one. To my delight, I got a tweet back from their design and communication coordinator, Kaitlyn Pescon, saying that while they weren’t actually giving them away, she would make arrangements to send me a few. From there, a lovely twitter friendship was born and Kaitlyn started reading all about Lily’s Big Adventures.
Fast forward a few months and I received a very unexpected email from Kaitlyn: the CDSS was putting together their Spring edition of their quarterly magazine, 21, and she wanted to know if I would be interested in writing an article for them. I was overjoyed, not only because it meant that I got to write for real, but because (as I’m sure is obvious), I love being able to share with people how amazing our lives have been since Lily joined our family. They gave me no real direction on what to write, just a word maximum – which was the hardest part to stick to! It took me several attempts to get the right feel for what I wanted to say: that facing life with a child with special needs can sometimes feel incredibly daunting and outright scary, but that when you become a parent the rest just falls into place. As parents, regardless of our child’s abilities, we worry that we’re not doing enough for them. We bask in their accomplishments and are constantly amazed at how fast they learn and change and grow, but we don’t allow ourselves to feel the pride in our own abilities – to nourish them and to cherish them and to make them feel secure and safe enough to develop.
And so, now that the CDSS Annual Conference is wrapped up for this year, I can put this article out there for the rest of you to see. It’s not a masterpiece, it’s not going to win any awards and you’re not going to wake up and find me on the talk-show circuit, but it’s just my own little piece of our world, out there for anyone to see…
Adventures in Adopting; Adventures with Lily
And very quickly, on a happy Lily note – we had our latest check-up with our Neurologist this week and she is incredibly happy with how Lily is progressing: it’s been just over a year without any signs of additional seizure activity! She, as always, reminded us that between being born early, having Down Syndrome and her brain injury that she is at a much higher risk for developing additional types of seizures, and so the plan is to keep her on her medications for 4 more years (as opposed to 2 years in a typical child), and then re-assess at that time. Seeing neurology, of all the clinics, always seems to be so incredibly rewarding. It was neurology, after her cardiac arrest, who told us that she was blind and that she wasn’t going to see again. It was her brain injury that kept her in that hospital bed, not moving her left side and keeping her personality hidden from us. But here we are, almost 2 years later and she’s thriving. She can see across the room and scoot her bum over to pull her toy off of the couch; she watches the cat stalk across the room and tries to grab her tail at every chance; she’s figuring out how to make her hands and her feet work together to keep standing in her playpen and she’s babbling up a storm. So, take that Neurology – don’t doubt her abilities!
