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.