To Tony’s Entire Therapy Team:

Thank You…

Each and every one of you took time out of your busy schedules in some way to either show up at meetings or write documentation to help our son’s educational advocate better understand his needs or to speak to those needs directly to school district representatives. This has been such a long journey for our family to get to this point, and each of you have had a role in the successes that have brought us here. None of this would be possible without the work you do, the expertise, and the time you contribute. I am beyond grateful to each of your for sharing even more of your time as we work to provide the smoothest transition possible back into the school system. Thank you.

A General Content Note:

We are going to remain busy for a while as we support extra meetings and assessments heading into Tony’s August reintroduction into our public school district. I am thankful that as my POTS improves, I have more and more energy every day…but part of the journey I need most right now is to find more of a balance where I recoup some personal time. When Tony’s new RBT comes in, and I’m not needed, I’m taking time to work on my ukulele skills or just something that has nothing to do with therapy and everything to do with self-nurturance. So, I’m still gonna be keeping the posts a little bit shorter for the next month or two at least. And, because I just know I have a limited desire to think about things that are too serious right now, and I know some of my loved ones have more serious things going on in their lives, my reading recommendation is going to be strictly for the fun of it.

Some Reading To Consider

Weapons of Old, Kent Wayne

Some time ago, I recommended the first book in this series because I really loved it. This is the second book in his young adult series, and I loved it enough to give it one of my currently-oh-so-rare-public-reviews. So, naturally, I am recommending it here also.

That being said, we need to get the disclaimers out of the way. First, for my religious loved ones who have certain criteria for what is appropriate content for media consumption, this book absolutely meets your cleanliness standards. That being said, just a reminder, many of his blog posts feature significantly more mature content as regards to sexuality. So, this book and the first one are definitely safe reading for your standards, the blog posts are best not to stick your toes into if you want to avoid descriptive sexual content. Second, the author and I have chatted regularly on-line since the release of his first book. Now, he’s under no obligation to continue to chat with me, and he has never, ever asked me to even finish reading any of his books much less review them (thank you for that, BTW). As limited as my current ability is to go out and interact with people who are not my son’s therapists, I really have been super grateful for those conversations and that interaction. So I naturally have biases because of that, but I’ve worked really hard to keep them out of my opinion of this book.

So, because I did review it on Goodreads, I’m not going to be super thorough here. Kent demonstrates enormous creativity in his world building in this book, and because I have read some of his other stuff, I can see his evolution as a writer and I think this book showed considerable skill in that regards. And I really cannot say enough good things about the creativity portion. I turned 47 recently, and I’ve been reading fantasy since elementary school, and so many ideas are just rewarmed up from book to book, but literally I’ve never encountered some of the types of things he describes in his world building for this book, and I loved that. And some of the scenes just really cracked me up. When I said I was exhausted a couple months back, it was the emotional kind because of all the things that have been going on. I was struggling to find my enthusiasm for reading when I started this book, and it was just something I was doing because it’s a rescue habit for me to be doing the kinds of things that help me feel better when life is hard (I just trust that if I follow through, the feeling will eventually find me), but the humor in the earlier parts of the book sparked a reawakening of my ability to feel that love of the moment in reading, and by about half-way through, I was anxious if I had to stop reading it because I wanted to see what happened next. So for those reasons, I am happy to recommend this book to any fellow fantasy lovers.