Tag:parenting
I Choose “Not Busy”
It’s become a cute, almost fashionable thing to say that “being busy is a choice.” It’s my new favorite thing to hate. Maybe for some people busy is a choice. I envy those people. If I actually had a choice in the matter I would choose to not be busy. I promise. Ask anyone who …
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A Life of Complaints
One day someone is going to ask me how I’m doing and I’m going to say, “Great!” and mean it. I say it all the time. Fine, okay, good, great—they’re all a lie. That’s what you do when someone asks in conversation. You say, “Fine,” and you move on. It’s polite. They’re only asking to …
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Celebrating the Little Things
This is not the kind of life that you measure in big victories. I have two children, one that is walking a more typical road and one that is… not. I know what it is like to celebrate milestones—and ache when they are missed. If we lived our “second” life waiting to meet the normal …
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It’s Dangerous to Compare
We’re all guilty of it. We compare ourselves to everyone, our children to their peers, our spouses to our friends’ spouses. We measure our houses, our cars, our jobs against others’. Everyone gets sucked into “Keeping Up with the Joneses” sometimes. It’s an especially dangerous game to play when you have a high functioning autistic …
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Bedside Manner
We spent years chasing zebras. Are you familiar with the expression? If you hear a horse, you should look for a horse—not a zebra. Don’t start with the exotic. Eventually, you rule out all of the horses and you have to start looking for something a little less common. Looking back at all of the …
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Back to School: The Coaches Meeting
This is one of the biggest steps in preparing to go back to school. It’s something that I agonize over when it begins to consume my mind weeks before it actually happens. It’s time to meet the teacher. Last year the bar was raised to the moon. Realistically, I know that we will never have …
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Back to School: Scrimmages
I didn’t post last week because we were on vacation—Sorry, not sorry! I have decided to turn my back to school posts into a little bit of a series though, so I am hoping to post twice this week. My last post was about easing out of summer and into a routine. Going on vacation …
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Back to School: The Warm-Up
Summer is never quite what I expect. It used to be relaxed and breezy—a chance to go to the pool everyday and do strange science experiments with the boys. They’ve outgrown the science experiments and our lives have gotten too hectic. When the boys were younger, not much changed from season to season (including the …
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What is Normal?
This year has been the year of changes. I largely attribute that to an amazing teacher, an amazing special ed teacher, and an amazing class. The perfect storm of opportunity for him to begin to find his place in this world. People are noticing. My mom comments on it all the time. He is at …
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Always Listening
The thing with Yoshi is that he hears everything, even when you think that he is not listening. It gets more interesting because he doesn’t forget anything. You would think that after ten years I would be more aware of these things. By now I should have learned to watch what I say, even if …
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