A Bit Of Gratitude…
To the EMS Coordinator for the Buckeye Valley Fire District (who will remain unnamed here) for helping me resolve a longstanding billing concern related to our son’s ambulance ride to the ER back in 2016, THANK YOU <3. For those of you who are family or who have been reading here for a while, you already know I have nothing but loving to send the way of our local fire team as it is for everything they did that night. Members of their team even started mopping the blood off my kitchen floor while we were discussing the need for an ambulance ride after they got a bandage on Tony. In a perfect world, I would be perfectly on top of every little detail of every circumstance in our life, but stepping into the world of parenting a child with significant needs can be beautiful, but rarely perfect, and almost always overwhelming when it comes to the sheer volume of things coming at me that need to be taken care of just for him alone. You have my deepest gratitude for taking the time to hear my need and immediately do something to help me address it.
A Note On Content
I took time off from writing posts here this past month, but certainly not from therapy, and definitely not from life. We’ve been busy…really, really busy! And, there’s still a lot going on behind the scenes, and some of it is just the sort of thing that can suck all the best emotional colors out of one’s day if allowed to do so. And just for me personally, I don’t want to loose focus on the good stuff, because it’s still going on too and just quite frankly, much happier to look at. I’d just really rather soak up and dwell in the positive (may it start to flood in rather than trickle!), so posts are resuming, but they will be very short, and just mostly highlights of something happy. Because we’ve reintegrated ABA into our schedule (which is going great, BTW), I haven’t really had much reading time with everything that is going on, and in keeping with that my recommendations are going to be short and focused on nothing heavy. Much love, Ari
Just a few happy moments from this past month…
Some Reading/Viewing To Consider
I was born in the 70’s (I’ll be 47 this month), I grew up in the 80’s, and many of us here know I have a longstanding love of hair metal bands just in part because that’s what I grew up listening to. And I make no apologies for any that. This article is really something I recommend for one reason though: this man’s attitude about life as expressed in the article rocks every bit as much as the music, and it’s a great example for handling chronic illness or other difficult circumstances of a lengthy duration.
I was listening to this while I was doing dishes, and very much liked the strategies she recommended for dealing with negativity, either within oneself or when it is coming from another. I have found it’s pretty easy, when one’s life is in crisis mode, to feel like the lemons and grapefruits are just coming in faster than they can be turned into a sweetened beverage for others to drink, so to speak, and to struggle to handle every stressful moment with grace. And definitely when I feel like I am living in that space, the negativity rolling off of someone else can impact me more, so I found this to be a very useful and timely episode.
*All photos for this post were by either Ariana or Andy
