Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Reclaiming FUN

I'm a day late on this post and I really am sorry about that.  I'd love to say that being late is not typical for me, but I can't.  Being a day late is not typical but late in general is how we typically roll.  This is not by design but a side-effect of our current life situation.

Amazingly enough, we made it to an appointment early one day this week and my oldest daughter said to me - "Something must be wrong.  This never happens. We're never early."  Thankfully nothing was wrong and I had a moment to talk to my daughter about a time in my life when I was usually on time or slightly early for most things.  I recall her laughing a lot during that conversation ;-)

I am currently in all-out planning mode for our summer and it is not a moment too soon...my propensity for lateness even carried over to my planning.  My oldest daughter is already out of school for the summer and my youngest wraps up this week with a summer session of 5 weeks schedule for later in the summer.  In addition to the school schedule we have therapy schedules that effect our summer plans.  Our family brainstormed a list of fun things to do this summer.  It's filled with wonderful ideas and the bonus is most of the things are cheap or free which means we might be able to complete many of them before school starts.

But planning the fun has been more difficult than I imagined because my little one has afternoon therapy sessions most days of the week.  Summer hasn't even started yet and I'm already annoyed with the frequency of her therapy sessions!  I have managed to adjust the schedule so there will only be 3 days/week with afternoon sessions instead of the standard 4 but even that seems extreme to me for summer.  And this made me quite grumpy.

Then I dug deep and reminded myself that we are in control of our schedule.  I always knew this but when your child is so far behind in meeting developmental milestones and is {actually} starting to make some wonderful progress I find it hard to remember to slow down or stop for a bit and I needed to reminded myself.

So I am planning our summer schedule with a high priority on doing most of the fun activities on our list and then I'll see what therapies work with our plans and we'll cancel or reschedule the rest.  We are making the choice to prioritize fun over therapy and tracking unmet milestones.  This decision made me very happy and I feel like our family will be more balanced this summer.  And I know Emma and all of us will thrive.  And that is something that makes me very Hopeful!


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Kristina is the mother of two charming daughters and wife to a wonderful man who puts up will all her wild ideas.  She works to raise awareness of cytomegalovirus (CMV) and preventing CMV exposure during pregnancy.  Kristina graduated from the national Partners in Policymaking program in September 2010 and is an advocate for disability rights and inclusion education.  You can read more at howlifehappens.blogspot.com

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