Answering a friends question

She asked 'what is your new normality?'
I replied 'It is many things'.

Someone asked me the other day how I was coping or managing having a child with special needs and a new baby. I said we were finding our own "new normality" and she asked what is my "new normality"?

It is many things. 

It is experiencing life through different eyes. I am seeing a lot of things for the first time even though this is baby two. I feel as I have been given a gift that I wished for but thought I'd never have. Sometimes I feel this gift might disappear or I wake up and it is a dream. I feel so blessed to have baby 2. 

Before baby 2, I was living and breathing a life with a child with special needs. Of course, we had fun in different ways and we would find joy in that. It was like it defined me - fundraising, appointments, tube feeding, sickness and therapy sessions but it doesn't.  I was letting it define me. I should not have. I'm still who I was before I had kids. Now, I hope, to have grown, changed and found strengths inside me I did not know existed. Now, I am in places I would not have been and made friends I would not have made. I still do all those things but now I have a five month old baby boy who I held not long after he was born and took home with 3 days after he was born. Two worlds have blended together and I could not be happier.  By having a non complicated pregnancy I saw how it should be or perhaps how I wanted it to be, I experienced something new though full of apprehension on the safe arrival of my precious boy. My husband and I are enjoying both children and their steps forward in life. 

A Poem Shared - Welcome to Holland

How is the best way to describe my life now and how it might have been. I want to share this poem with you that I found. 

Welcome to Holland

By Emily Perl Kingsley, 1987. All rights reserved.

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. 

It's like this...... When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland." "Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy." But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place. 

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned." And some of that pain will never, ever, ever, ever go away...because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss. But...if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland!