For those of you unaware of the amount of medically and psychologically necessary medications, I thought I would share this little tidbit with you. I'm not going to focus on the names in this post because I'm just looking to illustrate something else. Gavin's on at minimum, 17 pills a day. What you see below is a picture of his morning mess only.  Believe it or not, this is significantly less than what it used to be.  We have been able to safely remove several medications over the last few years. His doctors have said that we have removed everything that is possible to remove, at least at this time.  What's left is longterm medications that he simply couldn't function without. Several of the pills you see are related to…

Update: As of late yesterday afternoon, our power was restored. Thank you so much for your unbelievable everything. Please see my Official Update or more information. We had a really, really interesting wraparound meeting this morning. The long and short of it is this. Lizze is in crisis and we have to attend to her needs.  Gavin has to be home or its pointless to make all these trips to the doctors because we can't provide accurate information about how he's doing.  The meeting was ending and one of the people asked a question that could only be answered honestly by revealing just how bad things are for us right now.  I had assumed that they knew this stuff as they have read this blog before.  Apparently they didn't.  I…

I promised you the other day that I would finish updating you on what we are doing to help Lizze on her new journey through menopause. Essentially, Lizze is doing hormone replacement therapy.  She's doing the Estradiol Transdermal patch. This is basically a low dose form of estrogen.  Basically, she wears these little patches for 3.5 days before replacing g it with a new patch. While it's way to soon to see the benefits from this treatment, it's never too soon to experience the wonders of side effects, of which there are many. Here's a list of the basic side effects: unusual vaginal bleeding (especially if you are past menopause); chest pain or heavy feeling, pain spreading to the arm or shoulder, nausea, sweating, general ill feeling; sudden numbness or…

If you recall, I wrote a post the other night detailing something that had just happened in our neighborhood (see Thankfully one was hurt tonight). Basically, about 10 pm that night, someone rode through our neighborhood firing a high powered pellet gun at our house and my two neighbors houses as well.  My one neighbor got it the worst as this person with the gun blew out the back window of their Explores and also hit a window on the property as well.  It was dark and so I didn't actually see any damage at the time.  However, I was outside with Emmett this afternoon and I found three holes in our siding, all within a very short distance of a window. I don't know much about pellet or bb…

Okay people, I'm challenged with going grocery shopping for my special needs family of five, for the next week. While grocery shopping for kids with Autism and  sensory issue is difficult to begin with doing it with a budget of only $15 is, dare I say, impossible. That's the challenge facing me today. We have to come up with a grocery list that will feed my family of five for a week, on only $15. Yes, that's what it's come to at this point. Our budget this month hadn't taken into account Gavin's return home because we didn't know he was returning.  However, I'm trying to take this on as a challenge and make the most out of it.  It's really easy to feel beaten down but I'm really trying…

I would like to spend some time today focusing on how someone could help a special needs family. It's probably safe to say that each families needs might be different. While I'm not proud of this, my family needs all the help that we can get, from whomever is willing to offer it.  This very likely applies to many other families as well.  What I would like to do is help others to better understand the kind of things that could help families with special needs kids.  There are always people willing to help, they just might not know how to.  The truth is, at least in my experience, most special needs families don't want to burden anyone else with their problems. Can we please share how someone could help…