This post is a wee bit more sharing than I typically do.  But I am trying to find and share the blessings that come from storms in our lives.  Trying to find our new normal over the last few months has been anything but fun or pretty.  

And you come here to find beautiful finishes on beautiful or not so beautiful furniture… but it’s not always perfect behind the scenes.  

My hope is to share and give God the glory as we work through this and hopefully help or gain help from one of you that stumbled upon me today!!  Many of you have continued to send emails, private messages, and even texts to lift me up in prayer.  

And this is a hard hard post to write for this mama. But I do look for blessings through trials. 

One of my favorite worship songs by Natalie Grant is Back at My Heart- “Strong on the outside, But coming apart at the seams- That Me.  Tragically always together, But bruised underneath, Well that’s Me. I stand just to stumble, tripping on my pride.  Why do I always try to hide?”  This and the rest of the song has been the honest truth of my last few months here at home.  

If you follow along on here, Pinterest {where all these images can be found} , you already know that my love for Jesus & faith is BIG and are most important.  & if you truly know me and our family, then  you really know that God is always first and then family. 

Family is above all of our priorities… even when other’s don’t understand or can’t even fathom.  It doesn’t always make me the most popular but it Honors God in all that I do. 

I don’t want to be that girl who has all the right words, but doesn’t have her life as a reflection of what she speaks.  And part of that reflection lately, well is a messy life.  I’m far from perfect and learn lessons the hard way… because if it were easy, I wouldn’t be able to come out saying Thank you Lord!! I’d be praising myself… and that is never ever part of  God’s plan. 

So what am I getting at.. awhile back I asked for prayer on Facebook and took a rather silent road for quite some time.  Family life got messy, really messy.  And I will likely start a second blog  to help continue the healing process and hopefully touch lives of those who walk this same path of “not so typical” parenting!!  But today I want to share it here.  Y’all have always been so accepting of my personal sharing and I am so grateful!!  

I have made friends of sweet mama’s with other down syndrome angels and friends of painting enthusiasts alike, who just make me smile with their encouraging words of more than paint!!   This story is also why the paint drama is just a blessing in disguise.  I need to go back to the basics of why I started painting for others!!  Therapy!!  Which is why I love my custom clients!!  I don’t do this to compete or compare.  I truly love what I do.  And just painting for awesome clients, lets me LOVE on them and myself.

For any parents out there, that recognize the differences in your children early on… I say push harder to get the help you need.  My daughter is 15.  And unlike Mia, she wasn’t born with distinctive features that tell you she has “XYZ”.   She was born prematurely {8 weeks}, she was on an antibiotic for the first 2 years of her life, all but a couple of weeks total- lots of ear infections, delayed speech beyond 3 years, “day dreamed” a lot, rigid in routine, change caused major abnormally long tantrums, little eye contact, extreme sensitivity to textures, loud noises, and so many other things that should have been red flags when I would mention in concern to doctors… I knew something wasn’t right for so long.  But the tricky part is that little questionnaire every doctor would give to me to send to her teachers.  You see it was all at home that these behaviors were present and often exacerbated beyond our control.  So self-regulating at school and melting down at home was how we operated for years.  “behavioral issues can be fixed by parenting style changes”-  well maybe in typical children but for us- 6 hours of tantrums of your daughter screaming one simple word “MOM” and rocking herself violently back and forth and banging into the wall over and over and over…. didn’t seem so much like my parenting style.

I can remember every year saying a prayer that “7” would be different… and every year replacing that number with the new one.  The only thing that changed were the behaviors.  As she got older, it was more defiant and less frequent tantrums.  She became extremely rigid in routine and I recognized the fits surrounded by change.  But we spent many years of just being diagnosed with a non-specific learning disorder and nothing more.

When we moved here to Texas after adopting Mia, and many Mia therapies later… I took her to our private Speech Pathologist  {Again school had failed us, school had a signed waiver to perform one and never did}- we found her delayed speech at 13 was more than just the speech part.  Language processing disorders, memory retention problems, and sensory processing disorders.  We were able to trim some of the fits using music and bouncing on the trampoline but that didn’t change everything for her.  I began seeing the difference among her peers.  When you are little and playing it’s so much easier to be bossy and just play.  But as she got older it was the extremely focused/obsessed with certain topics that she would get stuck on and not let go that would wear her friends out.  They started dropping off… what we saw as typical fun loving and quirky “B” , was really socially years apart from her friends.  Then the self awareness of being different finally hit… and hit hard.  How? Well girls are mean.. and began to bully her.  Not just about her social awkwardness but about other things too- she couldn’t process it all together the way you and I could… and she couldn’t let go of it either…  And much of it she hid from us.  Talking about feelings was extremely hard for her.  She couldn’t tell us what she was feeling ever.  

So much more I will add another time, but the day after all the paint debacle… my sweet “typical” looking beautiful daughter, tried to overdose on Excedrin… We spent several days in ICU and when stabilized we were transferred to Children’s Inpatient Psych unit… I don’t think I have cried so hard in all my life.  But GOD was right there with us through it all .  He never left our side and especially not hers.  Days before this incident she asked me “Mom, where is God?  Why would he do this to me?”  If I had known the pain behind those words that day, I would have held her and never let go.

Leaving my daughter at Children’s was one of the hardest things I have ever done… and I have had to leave a newborn for 10 days in NICU, walk an adoption journey of almost 5 years with many ups and downs, so this was truly truly hard.  But what blessings God gave us in just that first two hours of  intake, was something I always searched for but couldn’t find… the truth.  The thing that made her, well her.  The diagnosis that one doctor tried to have her evaluated for the year prior to entering high school, but the ARD team literally laughed because she’s such an angel- Autism Spectrum Disorder/Aspergers.  She’s extremely high functioning but there were obvious pieces to that puzzle that this one brilliant doctor could see and get from her in just 2 hours.  I had waited for those 2 hours her entire life… literally.  It was a moment when she told me, that I sat there biting back tears.  Mad, grief, and now what… all at once.

Mad.  I was mad because all these years I had said everything she said to the doctor and more.  Why didn’t anyone see it, hear me, or want to help her?  Grief, my daughter just tried to kill herself and it took that horrible tragedy to get this help.  Just typing those words open flood gates.  Now what?  I am so type A.  I need to know what this means and how I can fix it.  

They say that dad’s just want to be able to find the solution and fix things.  Well, that is me too.  I don’t have time for a lot of drama.  That’s why God gave me Mia, I am sure!! I can’t fix down syndrome- but I can give her every therapy and life opportunities that someone else wouldn’t have the time or energy for.  I can do whatever it takes.  But this new diagnosis is uncharted grounds for me.  I didn’t write a judge a 14 page essay on what autism is and how I can provide for her. {Yes that is what we did for Mia and proving that we knew what we were getting into with her specific special needs.}  I have provided for her for 15 years and it’s been all wrong… well not all.  I’m flooding myself with books… learning what behaviors are AS and what behaviors are not.  I am learning that I can’t fix this for her, but can love on her extra hard.  I am learning that my new daily routines are needing to be a little different and a whole lot more scheduled- did I mention I am ADHD, no really… emphasis on H and SPONTANEOUS is my whole life.  I am FULL of life and with most of my little’s that is a good thing.  But now I need to learn calm and predictable, so we can weather this storm.

My dad said something to me through this all that I am holding onto, I need to take care of myself, so I can take care of them.  So, what do you do to take care of yourself?  I paint.  I had that bed set forever in the last post.  If Kim only knew that every brush stroke was full of prayer and tears…   So, I am going to keep  painting.  It’s therapy and it’s contributing to our family in many ways. 

Financially, like I have always said- I am showing how God can use my gifts and talents.  I am hoping that sharing our life with you will bless someone as well.  You see perfect or imperfectly perfect finishes on beautiful furniture.  And our family is beautiful and full of God’s beauty and grace.  But he gives us things in our lives to bring us through it stronger and ultimately to help someone else in life that is walking it too.  

Thank you for all of your prayers over our family.  Thank you for allowing me to share a little snippet of our life with you.   And thank you in advance for grace and any help or insight you have…