Tuesday 7 May 2013

The story so far...




 I've finally caved. Of course, if you're reading this hopefully not to rambling beginning, you're also doing your little bit in vindicating my wife's gentle badgering over the last several months. “Your perspective will be a useful resource to other parents and parents to be,” she's been saying to me. Time, of course, will no doubt tell.

“So,” I hear you collectively cry, “what is your story? What are the goals of this blog, how do you hope it will be useful?”

My Story
Lets start with first things first: me. I'm a British-born resident of Boston who was “imported” by his American wife in September 2012. We are expecting our first child, a boy, imminently (in late June 2013). My wife is incredibly lovely and has many fine qualities that I would be happy to share in another forum, but for the purposes of this blog (we'll call her Mrs. T. from here on) the relevant information is that she is able-bodied. I, on the other hand, am not.

Nearly 34 years ago, I surprised my parents by arriving into this world 2 months early, encouraged, according to family tradition, by the wafts of homemade chicken soup that I could no longer resist. Some amount of birth trauma ensued and the combination of being under-developed and deprived of oxygen for a period left me with Cerebral Palsy (CP).

In my case the CP is relatively mild.

In practice, that means that I walk with the aid of two walking sticks. Beyond that, my fine motor skills are not great, (for example my writing is messy rather than completely illegible and things like tying ties, doing up buttons and tying shoe laces are all challenging).  My spatial perception is also all out of whack (I have difficulty accurately judging the relative distance between objects), and my organizational skills are nothing to write home about- meaning, for instance, that time management is a perennial issue. I also have a processing issue which means that, in essence, it takes longer for messages to get from my brain to wherever they are going. This makes the performance of everyday tasks such as writing something like 25% more time consuming than average able-bodied folks. Whilst that gives you a sense of my challenges you'll also find at the bottom of this post various videos taken recently of me in preparation for Daddying, intended to give you a visual sense of my physical capabilities.

Goals
In terms of the goals of this blog . . . I intend to cover many of the issues I -- and we as a couple -- have faced and will continue to face in adaptive parenting.  I hope that our challenges, reflections, resources, and possible solutions will be of some use to you or people you know. I also intend for this blog to be an open forum where people feel welcomed and safe to share comments, insights, anecdotes, frustrations, ideas, solutions, and anything else that seems appropriate. I truly hope that together, we can create a resource that parents and parents to be will find helpful. My wife and I (clearly) have never done this before; we have no pretense of presuming that we have the answers. Perhaps the maxim of this blog ought to be knowledge shared is knowledge increased.

To keep things orderly, I intend to deal in my coming posts with one particular issue per post. Some upcoming topics will be as follows: carrying, transporting, and transitioning the baby between locations; diapering choices and diaper-changing; room set-up to maximize effectiveness and minimize transitions; and, bathing the baby. It goes without saying that more topics will be covered once the baby actually arrives and I move from the hypothetical and theoretical to the realities of adaptive parenting. Interspersed among all of this will be my own ramblings on reflection on life the universe and being a disabled father.

This whole process feels like an adventure. Here's to our adventure....