Journal Entry from May 9, 2008

Things have been a little stressful lately. I keep getting sick over and over and Thomas had pinkeye earlier this week. I have been feeling a little pessimistic lately. I’m not sure why. I just feel like I need to reorganize everything and start over. I’m looking into a private school that has a autism day program. We’re going to apply for TEFRA and even though it will be an expensive co-pay, I think this is going to consolidate and increase all his therapy. I’ve heard nothing but good things from this school so hopefully we like it. Evidently it would be $100,000 per year if you were to privately pay for it, which is outrageous. But we’ll apply for the TEFRA MA and between our insurance and TEFRA they’ll pay for it. We’ll have $100-150 monthly copay, but it’s so worth it. He definitely needs more than he is currently getting, so I am really anxious to see how this works out.

I’ve also been having a great internal debate about my job. I love my job for the most part. But I feel like I need to be spending more time with my son and my family. I just can’t juggle everything that I have to do. I have been struggling with all of it for so long and I am just exhausted. Plus, I’ve been working so hard on getting procedures written and validations ready for our new lab and the funding was not approved. I feel like I don’t really have much of a purpose right now. I wonder if I should move to the other location, which is a whole lot closer to home and would probably cut an hour off my daily commute. The opportunity I had with the new lab was a chance of a lifetime. A chance to prove myself and give myself leverage to move up. But now that’s gone. If I move to the other location, I love the people over there, but I’d be the new one, and the low one on the totem pole. I just don’t see a way to really move up there. Maybe I just need to find my nitch. I also thought about going part time, but they generally don’t do that and if they did it would probably just be a short-term kind of thing. It would also probably affect my benefits. I just don’t know what to do. I was really excited about the opportunity that fell in my lap and now I’ve lost that and I feel lost. But if I were to be a SAHM we wouldn’t have enough income to cover the bills and I’ll have a very difficult time getting back into the workforce. I had a hard enough time getting back into Microbiology as it was. If we get Thomas in one of these programs it will probably make me feel better. But I still feel like I should be going to some of the therapy sessions and some of the playgroups and things and overall just participating more. I just feel like I am failing.

Thomas has been doing pretty well. I wish we could just keep building on his improvements. It seems like he has a breakthrough here and there, but it’s not something that he continues to do. I hope that it changes, but his only regular words continue to be mama and dada. Yesterday was pretty good though. He said baba when he wanted his drink and later he was signing more and said more too. I am trying to work on the opposites with him, open and close, in and out, over and under, etc. He is using “more” like “I want”. But I guess that’s OK. He also was imitating me and H when we were making animal sounds. We mooed and woofed and he imitated our mouths. He didn’t actually make any noises, but the imitation is a very good thing. He’s actually been doing that more, imitating the mouth motions of words or sounds we make. Not consistent really, but more often than before.

I bought “Baby Babble” which is kind of like baby Einstein but with extra emphasis on the speech aspect. Thomas loves it. And when I say he loves it, that’s an understatement. There are some parts that he laughs at so hard that he practically falls over. It’s hilarious to watch him. Anyway, the video was put together by the founders of Thomas’s new speech therapist company. And I just got the call for his first speech appt. She’ll be doing it at the daycare. Next Wednesday will be the first appointment. She’ll be trying to fit in one session each week and starting in June they’ll get a regular time set up.

Wednesday when I picked Thomas up from daycare I let go of his hand while I was putting things into car. Sometimes he runs, and I follow, but sometimes he just waits to get into the car. Wednesday he ran and as I went to follow him I saw it was too late. He was stopped at the edge of this huge mud puddle. They were doing landscaping, so they had dug out this 5x5ft area, which had filled with rain. It was the nice black mud too. As I called his name, I saw him, as though in slow motion, fall face first into the puddle. He got right back up and was covered head to toe in dark black mud. He just looked down like, “what happened?”. I was laughing so hard I was almost crying and one of the aids from one of the other rooms at the daycare saw it happen too and she was laughing too. It was seriously one of the funniest things I have seen. I'm glad he wasn't upset about it, just stunned. So I brought him inside and had to change him in the bathroom. And of course he had already gone through his extra set of clothes that morning, so we borrowed extra clothes and went shoeless. Good times….