i dont know that i have ever sat and said this is me, im this or that. but if i had done so in the past i know that it has changed drastically since i married, since being married to a soldier, since growing up, becoming a mom to a son, becoming a mom to multiple sons, and even more so to medically fragile child and special need children to begin with.
i cant even begin to describe in words most days. in highschool (this is the only "before" i can really relate to, as i married out of highschool)i was shy, not outgoing, would be considered a conformist i guess, i never did anything to make myself stand out, never wanted the extra added attention. let me also say i still dont do anything out of my new "normal" to draw attention. i married my highschool sweetheart 6 days before he left for basic training for the army, this was pre-9-11, we werent "at war" there didnt seem to be an impending war approaching, at least not to me, i never watched the news, i knew very little to nothing about other contries, i had lived in the same house in the same small town, gone to the same school my entire life. my life was stable, it was comfortable.
after being married and after basic training we learned we were to move to Germany, a country i knew nothing about, thousands of miles away from my family, my friends, my life. i left on a hope and a prayer that this was the right decision. we lived in Germany for 3 years, 1 of those years i HATED it, i HATED everything....i was still a child, and homesick! we had our first son shortly after arriving in Germany and it started to grow on me, this was "home" i met some friends and began to enjoy life. then 9-11 happend, our world was shattered. we were "at war".
Harold quickly deployed to iraq, the first deployement was about 7 months long. i stayed in Germany, afraid to go home, afraid to leave my new home, afraid he may never come back home. little did i know this was only the begining of our deployments, our seperations. Micheal was about 15 months old when Harold came back from iraq, suddenly life was normal again. at Mikey's 18 month check up they told us his fine motor skills were lagging behind, as well as his speech, he seemed pretty "normal" to me and i was in denial i guess. they had us fill out some questionairs and they assessed him some more, i was then told he had Sensory Intergration Dysfunction, now called Sensory Processing Disorder or SPD. i had no idea what this ment. for us it ment a few months in speech and ocupational therapy in Germany and that was the end of it. i wasnt accustomed to the internet much,didnt "google" it, didnt learn anything more than what i was told that day. it really just didnt seem like that big of a deal. so what my kid couldnt stack blocks, or hold his spoon, he walked into walls alot, he fell...he was clumsey! so what if he only knew 10 words by the time he was 2, he was cute as a button and soooo smart with electronics, he could work the vcr, the tv, the dvd player and computer...he wasnt "behind".
then one day right before he turned 2 years old, just a couple weeks before we were to leave Germany and move back to Texas, Mikey had a seziure! i had NEVER before seen one, i was alone in the apartment when he had it, we had no phone, as we were about to move, i was young i didnt know what to do, i scooped him up automatically and raced down a flight of our stairs to the nearest neighbor at home, whom i hadnt met and begged to use the phone. i called Harold and he raced home, we took mikey to the ER where he had 2 more seziures. we were quickly taken to the German hospital and admited. for about a week we were in the hospital waiting to find out WHY and WHAT was going on. in the end, Ear infection was the cause...his fever spiked really fast, not really high though, just fast, and sent his body into a febrile seziure. we were sent home with antibiotics, however we had no "home" at this point, we had already cleared, or rather, Harold had already cleared the apartment and given the keys up, we were in a small 1 room hotel until our flight out of country. mikey continued to have seziures every couple of months when his fever would spike fast, each time we were told he would probably never have another, each time he did. he finally "grew" out of them when he was about 4.
since moving back to the states, we kinda put the whole Sensory processing disorder on the back burner, there was alot going on, with the move, finding a new home, getting situated and accostomed to our new life, and i thought mikey had pretty much outgrown this. "he was quirky" i would tell my mom, he would line cars up in one direction and knew if you moved even one of them, he didnt like to get dirty (worked in our favor for potty training, he trained in 1 week with cloth underware) didnt like the way certian foods felt, the grass, bubbles in his bath, water over his head...but hey, we had no one else to compare this to...he was "just quirky" he loved to watch things spin...hotwheel cars, fans, sippy cups rolling on the floor...
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