So I ran with it.
But before I ran too far, I had a baby. My faithful mom (who happened to also be a preschool teacher) kept up the work with Sophie while I recovered from my C-section, but I was back at it within just a few days. Those days were a blur of nursing a newborn, little sleep, and working with Sophie on her speech and OT activities. After Christmas and then the New Year, I began to realize that Sophie was really improving. After about 3 months of hard work, we were seeing RESULTS.
So we kept up the work. It wasn’t always easy…Sophie is a stubborn girl and when there was an activity she didn’t want to do or was frustrated with, we would often both end up in tears. There was plenty of “stepping away” and coming back to it a few hours later. I drove her to speech, I drove her to OT, I drove her to preschool. In the summer, I drove her to a social skills group. My poor baby guy spent the first year of his life in my minivan and in waiting rooms, on behalf of his big sis.
Long story slightly shorter…Sophie came through these hard delays. Instead of three to four years of speech and occupational therapy, she graduated from both therapies in just 18 months. She went from severely delayed to totally caught up in all the ways.
It was a miracle, my friends.
A miracle that looked a LOT like hard work.
It was also the absolute HARDEST year and a half of my life—but I’d do it again and again if I had to. And here are three things I learned during our journey.
1. If God calls you to it, He will equip you for it.
Friends, I had no idea how to be a teacher, a speech therapist, or an occupational therapist at home. But I learned. God helped me to learn and even get good at it. He was NOT going to leave me hanging. He called me to be Sophie’s mom and helped me give her what she needed.
2. God knows what we need way better than we do.
Did I WANT a child with special needs? Nope. Did I NEED one? Yep. Because of Sophie’s delays, my heart became softened and my mind opened to the special needs and disability community. I am now active in advocating for and raising money for people with disabilities in our community because of all I experienced with Sophie, and I am also now aware of what an AMAZING and ESSENTIAL part of the kingdom of God people with disabilities are.
3. You are the expert on your own child.
Throughout my journey with Sophie, I had to attend and receive results from multiple kinds of testing and evaluations, some psychological, some medical. Sometimes professionals would try to tell me and my husband things about Sophie that we knew in our hearts and our GUTS were not true. Just wrong or misinterpreted results. In this situations we advocated for her, and we were proven right each time. Yes, she had deficits that I could see and admit, but I was also committed to making sure she was not misdiagnosed or labeled in an incorrect way.
That Tuesday was truly the first Tuesday of the rest of my life, but despite all the worry, red tape, and hard work that came after it, six years later I am beyond thankful for that day. Because my daughter is better for it…and so am I.
