A Glimpse Into Our Future

The last several years have been full of adjustments. Certainly, the last couple of months have been plenty full of their share of adjustment periods as well. We are in the midst of one of our newest adjustments now with both girls heading off to school in the mornings and Kelly heading off to work at the preschool. We didn't know what to expect, but it certainly hasn't been easy. For the first time in my working life, I am the last one out of the house. That has been quite a bit different in itself.

Abby came home from her first day of preschool with a scrapbook project that needed to be completed. She had a week to get it done and it certainly was nothing unreasonable. It was something that should be fun for her and fun for us. Her job was to select some photos of herself, her friends, her family, etc. to put onto the page to show some of her interests and hobbies. She could also use stickers, draw pictures, or whatever she wanted to communicate who she is. Unfortunately for her, her parents are sort of a disorganized mess and even getting off the ground was a chore. I thought it made the most logical sense for us to work on this right after dinner. We were all at the table already, we had a nice large clear space to put things out and this should be fun right????? Wrong!

To begin with, we have pictures everywhere! Now that we are part of the smart phone and tablet generation, we have things in multiple places and often times have no idea how to find any of it! I had some pictures on my phone and many pictures on Facebook that were not saved to my phone. Kelly had many pictures on her phone, some on Facebook, and even more on the iPad. Of course, we had to run all picture options past Abby. By the time she decided what photo she wanted, we had to go back and find it and usually couldn't remember where we had seen the picture in the first place. Once we found the picture then we had to decide whether to put them all together and have them printed somewhere (there weren't that many pictures) or try to print them on our new printer that only prints when it feels like it.

In the meantime Abby is talking a mile a minute, she is bored, wants to draw something, has bug bites, needs a kleenex, sure is thirsty, look there's a chicken.......Good grief! All the while, Elise is sitting at the table, having seizures, retching, and trying to get out of her chair to walk around. She is "confined" to her chair because her food pump is going but isn't working right. For some reason the pump has decided it doesn't like the new diet she is on and decides to alarm every 15 seconds. For two hours straight! Now, two days in a row! This is no exaggeration. Her 45ish minute feeding took more than 2 hours! Another good grief!!!! By the time we were done, about 8:30, Abby's project was mostly done (we still have another day to work on it), we were 30 minutes past bedtime, Elise's food was STILL not done. I was looking for a "Calgone take me away" moment. Honestly, I would have settled for anything take me away!

As I was sitting with Elise getting her ready for bed I began to wonder, is this what our future holds? Do we really have years of sitting at the table helping Abby with her homework while we have to stop every 15 seconds to deal with some medical issue for Elise? Like everything, I suppose we will get accustomed to it, but I sure don't like it! I don't like that we can't give Abby our undivided attention, I don't like that we can't give Elise our undivided attention, and I really don't like that we can't even give ourselves our undivided attention! But, this too will become "normal" over time.

As I was looking for a book to read with Elise before bed I came across a book that my parents had given our girls a couple of years ago. It is a recorded book that my mom insisted on them having. Her and my dad were not big readers, and I don't know that I ever recall them reading to our kids. But, they now have a recorded book of both of my parents reading this story to them. They will never grow up to know them, but they will at least get the joy of having them read this story to them. As I listened to the book it certainly helped to calm my nerves and I believe that Elise enjoyed it quite a bit as well. I know that my parents would have liked to know that they could help in some small way, and tonight they did just that for me. I just hope the book lasts. We have a lot of years of homework ahead of us!