Special Needs

To My Child with Cystic Fibrosis: Please Outlive Me There are times where it hits me out of nowhere. Brushing my teeth, driving to work, folding laundry … times where I am doing the most mundane things and my guard is down. It’s at those times that my mind reminds me “You might have to say goodbye to him sooner than you would like.” Our son has an incurable, life-threatening chronic illness. Jax has cystic fibrosis (CF). CF is an unpredictable, life-shortening genetic disease. It’s an ugly disease that causes a myriad of complications, mainly lung infections and respiratory failure. We found out about cystic fibrosis on a Friday afternoon. Jax was eight days old, and it had been a long day....

Disclosure :: This post is sponsored by The Emerge Center. That said, we appreciate this beautifully honest post written by Mandy Cowley, Emerge parent, & Brandi Monjure, Communications and Events Coordinator at The Emerge Center, as much as we do!  Take a moment to think about the typical, everyday stresses you face as a mom. Twenty birthday invitations need to be mailed tomorrow. Dinner for five needs to be on the table in an hour. Two kids need to brush their teeth, take a bath, and be in bed by eight. It all adds up, and we know you stay busy juggling it all! Now imagine adding just a few more variables into that equation…Therapy for your child is too expensive to be able...

I’m a worse case scenario kind of person. If my husband calls me on his way home from work, I answer assuming he’s been in a car accident. If I hear one of my children fall in his bedroom, I’m mentally preparing myself for a trip to the ER. Granted, these worse cases rarely ever happen in real life, but I can’t help myself from readying for them. So when my 4-year-old son failed an eye exam – despite having new glasses – I was prepared to hear some sort of bad news. As it turns out, we didn’t get the worse possible news, which of course would be cancer or some other life threatening condition. But what I did...

We all have fears and worries when it comes to our children. The first several years of my son Baylor’s life was filled with just that… The constant fear of losing him in a store or crowded area. How would I ever find him when he can’t even speak, much less tell someone his name? Or being upset when he has been pumped about Halloween for weeks and weeks but 5 minutes before leaving, your child does a 180 and suddenly doesn’t want to go. After pulling him aside and talking to him, you realize he doesn’t want to go now because he remembers he can’t say “Trick or Treat” like the other children. Imagine looking out your front...

“Mama? What’s college?” she asked a few months ago as we passed LSU on the interstate after I pointed out where I went to college. I explained in seven-year-old terms that college is where people go to learn how to do their jobs. I went to learn to be a teacher, and her daddy learned to be a nurse. That satisfied her, and I quickly forgot the exchange. Simple things haven’t always come easy to my girl. She hit most major milestones on the late end of the normal range. Her speech wasn’t clear to most people until well into her third year of life. When we expressed concern, it was dismissed time and again, because she sat on the...