mood lifter

some days when the stress is great and i feel down, i watch " john and kate plus 8" on TLC, i mean cmon...6 kids that are 2 and 2 that are 6years...yea they got stress! so it makes me feel better. some days i read this...

Welcome to Holland

by: Emily Kingsley


I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability-to try to help people who have not shared the 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 trip to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum Michelangelo’s "David". The gondolas in Venice. You may even 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 flight attendant comes and says, "Welcome to Holland". "Holland?!" you say. "What do you mean Holland? I signed up for Italy! I’m suppose to be in Italy! All my life I have dreamed of going to Italy"

But there’s been a change of plans. 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 guidebooks. You must learn a new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would have never 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, 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 suppose to go. That is what I had planned. And the plan of that will never, ever go away, because the loss of that dream is a 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.