Feeding your Marriage with a Special Needs Child

This weekend was about my husband BJ. We took a road trip Sunday after Mass to Ohio to pick up some new pens for the show pigs. We spent nine hours together. It was a beautiful drive in farmland. We had the best conversations about family. We talked about the wedding coming up for Angel and Beau and how this is the beginning of a new chapter. The chapters will start to come faster now. Before you know it, it will be more marriages and grandkids.

We talked about our dreams. We share the same dreams and more than anything we share humor. We love to tease each other and we laugh a lot. Laughter has gotten us through so many things. Anger! Hurt feelings! BJ has this wonderful way of saying something to shake me to a smile. I am able to do the same. This has lightened up many stressful moments.

BJ injured his eye this past week and thank God will be okay. It was scary. As soon as panic rose inside of me, I took solace that God was in charge. After a deep breath and a couple of funny snide remarks about the situation we relaxed into each other. This is the sacrament of our marriage. The bond of love between Christ and His people. Ours is a sacramental marriage.

In our family, we depend on each other to help. Help with feeding Kate, changing a diaper, taking a turn playing blocks or reading a book. Everyone gets burned out at some point so that is when a person needs a day off. BJ and I are no different. We need a date night or just a day like yesterday. To reconnect. If you have a special needs child, you need to remember that you need to still nurture the marriage. If you are friends or relatives with a special needs family, help nurture this family. Even if is just a phone call or a cup of coffee. God didn't just have a plan for our family with Kate. It goes out to all our friends and family too. How has Kate changed their hearts? For good or bad? We are trying to pray that people's hearts were changed to love more.

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Don't Judge a Special Needs Family

Have you ever been misunderstood? Have you ever tried to do the right thing and have a whole bunch of wicked come hurling at you? What did you do? Did you start to endlessly explain your motives so it could be twisted by the few people that dislike you? Or did you stay silent? Staying silent is not my strong point, thus the blog.;) When I became pregnant with Looly (Kate), I noticed some big changes within myself. I had to fight to keep her alive because of a difficult pregnancy. Then at the end of my pregnancy I had to fight to keep us both alive. Then we were told Looly had Down Syndrome. At that time, we were grateful to God that she was alive and later we were thanking God that her heart was healthy and there was no neurological damage. She just has Down Syndrome. Just Down Syndrome. Say those words...just Down Syndrome. That is what I do, I simplify difficult things, then reflect and think I'm crazy. I was connected to this child at conception. I begged God to let me car...

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Today I realized something amazing has happened. I found peace. Every weekday morning Kate happily gets out of bed EXCITED to go to school. She loves it so much and so do we. When we walk into school in the morning she can barely contain herself, waiting for her teacher to come and take her to class. She smiles bigley! For the first time since I was pregnant with her I am not worried about her. We see her changing so much! She is calmer. She is more engaged. She is listening to directions and she is so loving. To not worry about Kate is so new and so peaceful. The teachers and all the workers are so kind and caring. We knew this school was a perfect fit. Trinity and I witnessed a very stressful event with a child in the parking lot, one morning. The school was so on top of it and expertly handled the incident professionally and lovingly. To work full-time with special needs children, you need a loving heart. That is all I see. I see parents that want so much for their ...

Aborting Down Syndrome Babies

I read this article this morning. As I read the comments from parents that said they would abort their baby if they found out it was going to have Down Syndrome, it occurred to me what a different conversation there would be if they didn't know they were going to have a baby with Down Syndrome. These people would learn that they were given a gift. The comment "I would have a very hard time dealing with a retarded child. Retardation is relative, it could be so negligible that the child is normal, or so severe that the child has nothing… All of the sharing things you want to do, the things you want to share with a child – that, to me, is the essence of being a father. There would be a big void that I would feel. I would feel grief, not having what I consider a normal family." Let's talk about this statement. If you had a "retarded" child, the first thing you would do, is stop using that word. You have a child that has Down Syndrome. This is not who t...

Being Up With Down Syndrome

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