A Medical Mama Planner

I've been working lately on a planner specifically tailored to moms of children with medical needs and it now is live on Amazon! Inside you'll find places to record things like: Diagnoses Doctors Meds List Surgeries Emergency Bag Packing List and more! You'll also find pages to help you think through trauma triggers for you …

Fall Apart

Remember this for yourself. Remember this for those you love.  When life hands you crisis after crisis after crisis, there is no time to fall apart, there is no opportunity.  You simply have to keep going and going and going.  And then there’s a calm moment and a new crisis doesn’t immediately descend and you …

Track Shelving Faux Fireplace

More Pinterest-y stuff as I try to reclaim Christmas this year. This is a Use What You Have project and what I had was a wall full of track shelving. What I wanted was a fireplace. A mantel to decorate for Christmas, complete with stockings. This is what I started with. Sort of. This was …

Gingerbread House Advent Calendar

This is a super Pinterest Mom blog post. #sorrynotsorry In my Project Reclaim Christmas efforts, I knew I wanted a fun Advent calendar for the girls, but I tell ya what, that's no easy task with all the extra concerns we have to think through. Candy? No go. Oldest isn't much of a fan, youngest …

Marriage Tips for Special Needs Parents

So let’s start with the elephant in the room. Though maybe that’s not the right analogy, because it turns out this elephant is talked about all the time and isn’t actually real.  You can’t go anywhere without someone mentioning this mythical 80% divorce rate of special needs parents. Geez, people, talk about discouraging.  But it’s …

The Development of Independence

Originally posted on my Facebook page. Follow there for more mini posts. When our daughter was 2 and 3, she was really a breeze. Laid back, sweet tempered, I was so glad we got to skip out on the Terrible 2s and 3s. Umm...yeah, no. We didn’t get to skip them. Turns out her health …

Needing Promotes Understanding

Originally posted on my Facebook page. Follow there for more mini posts. When our daughter was first born, I felt so intensely alone. We didn’t have a definite diagnosis yet and we were thrown into the world of caring for a medically fragile infant. We were fortunate, though. We got a diagnosis. And that was …

PTSD in a Medical Mom

Originally posted on my Facebook page. Follow there for more mini posts. What does PTSD look like in a medical mom? Like tears when you hear ambulance sirens. Like bolting upright in bed because of constant nightmares. Like fear gripping you with every photo of your child, wondering if it will be the ‘last one.’ …

Priority Maximum

Originally posted on my Facebook page. Follow there for more mini posts. Today I had a rather large ‘Aha!’ moment. Wanna hear it? It’s pretty profound. 1+1=2 Wow, right? Yes, yes, I know it seems painfully obvious, but lately it’s felt more like 1+1=4. Or 7. Or 528. It just seemed like there was no …

Processing Power

Originally posted on my Facebook page. Follow there for other mini posts. For the last several years, I’ve beat myself up for being weak, for being pathetic, for being incapable of handling the things I used to. I look back to our daughter’s first four years and how much I was doing despite the lack …