Holland

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas of Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting. After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland.""Holland?!?!" you say. "What do you mean, Holland?? I signed up for Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy." But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place. So you must go out and buy new guidebooks. And you must meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.It's just a different place. It's slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around ...and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills. Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandt's.But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy...and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say, "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned." And the pain of that will never, ever, ever go away...because the loss of the dream is a very significant loss.But...if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special... the very lovely things... about Holland.

~by Emily Perl Kingsley. (Her response when asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared in that unique experience to understand it. It's like Holland.)

Thanks to my beautiful, special baby, Isaac, I get to learn more about "being in Holland" than I ever thought I'd want to know. I've never even thought of visiting a place like Holland before, but now I'm getting prepared for the journey and am very curious as to what it will be like...
(Maybe we get the best of both worlds since we were initally sent to Italy for his ABR test and were actually able to experience the gondola's in Venice last month due to the appointment cancellations :-)