A teacher, a dog walker, and an answered prayer.
We are currently in the middle of the COVID 19 pandemic. I think it’s week 4. I’m not sure. Time blurs.
I was feeling it yesterday. The weight of it all. Not being able to leave the house. All the closures. Working from home while teaching my children and doing their assignments with them. The unknown about when this will end. All the cancelled events. I wrote last night I was a tired that sleep couldn’t fix. I moped. I prayed. I moped some more.
I wrote in my journal and meditated on gratitude. Gratitude is always a secret ingredient to shifting out of a bad perspective. Where our focus goes, our energy flows.
Today my daughter with dyspraxia and cerebral palsy took a BIG header over her scooter. I know it must be bad when my son came running in announcing almost panicked, “Ashlynn fell again!!”
Ashlynn falls a lot. It’s the nature of her disorder. It gets better the stronger she is, but with no private or school PT, she has weakened a bit. She’s fallen a lot lately, but usually just her knees. She rarely tells us because she has a high tolerance for pain, which can be a blessing and a
curse. Jace never comes running like that for a hurt knee.
That’s when I saw her bloody face. Blood was in her eye, under her nose and in her mouth. I usually panic but I just ran and hugged her while my husband got a cold compress. It was a bad fall. Her eye and lip are swollen. I’m guessing she will have a black eye. We cleaned her up and she rested for 30 minutes snuggling with her dad.
I went about doing work and chores and 30 minutes later found her outside back on her scooter.
That’s Ashlynn. She’s the strongest person I know. She literally and figuratively always gets back up. She never stops trying. She has been her happy self during this quarantine. She walks the dogs. She persevered through all of her school work with a smile. She still wants to a teacher and dog walker.
I called out to take a break and she started crying. She asked if we could walk the dogs instead. We’s already walked them today for 40 minutes but I agreed. And as usual, as her dog pulled the leash she ran giggling ahead.
It immediately brought me out of my funk. I was looking at her back that said “A voice” and thought how hard she had fought to find her voice. Life has always been hard for her. Why had I been moping again? Was I seriously moping yesterday? In that moment the dogs got tangled and Ashlynn burst out laughing and I laughed with her.
A teacher, a dog walker, and an answered prayer to me through her.
Laura Smith, M.A. CCC-SLP is a 2014 graduate of Apraxia Kids Boot Camp, has completed the PROMPT Level 1 training, and the Kaufman Speech to Language Protocol (K-SLP). She is the author of Overcoming Apraxia and has lectured throughout the United States on CAS and related issues. Currently, Laura is a practicing SLP specializing in apraxia at her clinic A Mile High Speech Therapy in Aurora, Colorado.