Saturday Storytelling...

It's 2011, already!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE !!!

We've been spending a lot of time on the road over the Christmas holidays.  I think everyone ought to log in a few hours on "roadtrips".  There are always some good conversations and some good arguments, just as there are good roads and bad roads along the way.

Special needs families can do the roadtripping too - it's just best to plan ahead and try and think of every contingency.  Now that sounds like something you just put on your to-do list for the trip... but in reality it is bigger than anything else with a checkbox beside it. 

Special needs parents will ask themselves a ton of questions about "what could possibly go wrong?", cover most of them by bringing along things or techniques to manage the possible difficulty, but there will be some things that just slip in with no advance warning... and no matter how experienced the parent is with the needs of the child.

Our last trip included travel through snowy weather which we don't usually see.  Snow came down, it blew around, and it stuck... to everything!  The roads weren't the biggest problem, the temperature was!  Brrrr!!   We were tucking everything we could find around our son with special needs, to keep him warm enough so we didn't have to run the heater on high and toast ourselves crispy!   The problem we didn't foresee was that if (did I say IF?) the son developed a leak in his protective-wear, all of these clothes and fleece items were going to get wet and need to be stored somewhere until we arrived safely at our destination... 

It all turned out okay, though.  We located a large black plastic trash can liner and used that for containing everything.   Never have I been so grateful for our family tradition of marking a black trash bag (filled with Christmas gifts ) with the silver-Sharpie words "NOT Trash!!"