brothers

a good friend of mine turned me onto a quote..."worry is interest paid on a debt you dont owe" (or something close to that). i try to remind myself of that on a pretty regular basis.

but yet i worry. one of my worries is whether dom and vincent will have the kind of brotherly relationship i had imagined for them. being an only child myself, much of that envisioned relationship was based on television or seeing family friends...but i just worry about their relationship...fully recognizing that it will occur independent of anything that i do and that i have little control over it.

interest on a debt you dont owe.

so in the midst of that worry something like this happens. to set this scene up, the boys are sharing a lollipop here. i found out that little brothers can hold their own, regardless of impairment.

vincent doesnt want to share (naturally...i mean who would?) but gommy keeps coming after him. they bicker like little brothers do and should. and dom comes after his big brother like little brothers do and should.

its stuff like this that makes me realize how little control i have...and how wonderful that is. that my worries dont mean anything. that really what i do have are two beautiful children who love each other and whose relationship will grow and thrive in it's own unique beautiful way...and soon there will be three beautiful children whose will develop a unique relationship inclusive of individual abilities, inabilities, emotional quirks...the whole nine.

and while i'm here, i have to brag a bit on my eldest. you guys...he is such a great big brother. the other night he was hanging with my mom. dom was talking/laughing himself to sleep in the other room, and my mom asked vincent "do you wish gommy talked to you more"?

vincent answered in the way he always does. he said "gommy talks. he just talks in his own way. someday he'll be able to talk like me and i'll understand him better". and with that it was done. vincent had taught my mother that talking isnt necessarily the only form of communication between brothers.

vincent is the kind of child that starts singing softly to dom when dom starts crying. vincent is the type of child that immediately runs to tell me when dom is in any sort of trouble. vincent is the type of child that contantly asks D how his little sister is doing. vincent on numerous occasions has tried his darndest to take charge of a situation and show gommy just how to do things like play with legos or play games on his ipad.

so while i was over here worrying about their relationship...i should have been having some faith in the fact that vincent and dominic both are just good kids. good kids who love each other. and maybe their interactional style might not have been what i expected or dreamed of...but it's somehow surpassed all of that and both of them are going to be better for it.

worry is interest on a debt you dont owe. my kids continue to teach me that lesson.

life comes at you fast

well...our little story had another wrinkle thrown in. many of you know that dom's beloved caregiver found out she has an aggressive form of breast cancer back in january (happy to report that she is fighting like hell--and winning!), leading to us needing to find care for gommy.

the temporary solution was D's mom shouldering all of the burden and coming in to help us on a weekly basis for close to 5 months. words cant describe what she did and continues to do for us. she is our hero in all of this.

the longer term solution was to work with an au pair agency to find someone to come in and take care of the kids...so that's what we did. and it worked for a while.

but it stopped working. circumstances out of our control (and ones that are terribly frustrating to us) have led to us being without childcare again on a temporary basis (who knows what temporary means).

fortunately for us d and i are pretty resilient, and spent time this week working on steps 1A through 1E...until we realized that we should probably wait to see what happens with those before we move on to step 1F. we will get through this. we will survive this. i dont know if those two sentences are me reflecting on the situation or if they are a mini pep talk...maybe they're some combination of the two.

but we are back to square one. and it's frustrating and a bit disheartening to be here.

i told my mom about this yesterday and she said "well, just remember what you've been through. you've been through news about gommy and survived that. you'll survive this"...which at first took me a back, but later i realized is completely true. this aint sh*t. we'll get through this.

i dont know what the solution is going to be. not sure if we're going to go back to the au pair agency, or if we're going to look at  in town solutions (naturally we are looking at both right now). i also went to a daycare to drop a deposit for didi (daddy's nickname for his little girl), and while i was there i asked about whether they had ever had kids with disabilities in their facility. the person i talked to paused before giving me an answer....

pauses arent very encouraging.

and the answer was that they could work with us to figure it out. that they have had kids with down syndrome and autism, but no kids with mobility issues. so they'd have to start from scratch. the thing that scares me about that is that daycares are typically organized by ability--meaning once a kid starts walking they move out of one room. once they start doing other things they move into a different room.

dom has the intellectual needs of a 2.5 year old but he's stuck in the body of an 8 month old. that combo is not good for daycares who classify based mostly on physical ability. i'm sure the system works, but the system was designed for neurotypical kids and therefore we just dont fit into it.

but we'll figure that out too.

someday we'll be able to look back on this and shake our head with a smile and say "man, you remember that? remember how stressful that time was? remember how we talked about moving or quitting jobs? how silly was that?"

we'll get to that point someday. we're not there yet today, but we'll get there someday.