The day is crisp, cool, green and blue and full of energy.  I’ve had good clothes on all day and so not doing any gardening.  And I need to get into the garden.  Julia is finished with therapy at 5:30.  We could go home and instead of rushing to get dinner ready, I could change and dig and allow Julia to hunt for bugs.

Ah, and bugs.  When Julia got into the car . . . before bugs . . . Yesterday, when I went to pick Julia up from school, she ran out of the building by herself!  It was the first time that she came out without an aide.  How to explain the small victory, forward movement.  Because transitions are such a challenge for Julia, leaving school could be just as difficult a transition as trying to get her to stop drawing.  For years, she has been the last kid out of school, sometimes with coat half on, or back pack half packed with her adult trailing after her with full hands or almost dragging her out of the building.  She rarely would say hello to me when I was meeting her and would refuse to say good-bye to the faithful grown up who had delivered her to me.  So, some of the challenge was transitioning and some of it was the shutting down that transitioning could bring.  The long term plan was to fade the grown up help so that she could leave independently like all the other kids, but I didn’t see it coming so soon.  Yesterday was the first time she came running out of the building, looking like every other 5th grader.  And today, she was very much disappointed because I picked her up again and she didn’t get the chance to run to the bus by herself.  Run to the bus by herself!!!

And the bugs . . . so, when Julia got in to the car, she told me she had been catching bugs and wanted to add them to her bug collection.  I asked where she was keeping them right now and she said in her jeans pocket.  Umm, well, they can’t be alive, I told her.  This was not good news and when I checked them out, it was clear that none of them were moving.  She was disappointed and decided that she had to figure out how to bring them home alive.  

What an interesting child.

I went to a Family Navigator meeting today and felt my usual lost, confused, ineffective, and just plain stupid since this was my first meeting of a project that has been discussed for months but is still in the formation process.  My task through that meeting was to breathe!  And to let it happen.  To remember that I am the student here.  No one expects me to lead here.  And I don’t have to lead here.  Reading this over . . . well, duh.  But this is my underlying processing.  To be competent, to be successful, I have to eventually lead.  And, wow, that is crazy.  

So, I put myself in these places where there is no way that I will ever lead in order to learn things that there is no other way for me to learn, and then I ensure that the experience will make me feel badly because I define success only as leading.  There may also be a reverse that is operating -- when I am in a place where I will become the natural leader, I do not value the experience because it is too easy.  So, I cannot help but fail if I intend to lead the Family Navigator project and I give myself no credit for working to launch the Special Ed PEG group because of course, I am the natural leader on that one.  

Acceptance, acceptance, acceptance.  Just who and what I am.  

I am studying on line for Safety and Infection Control Clinical for non-employee students and non-UWHC employees Exam that I need to work in the clinic.  It is not a big deal and I reviewed the material and took the “exam” last year.  I am not sure what I thought about it last year.  This year, I see all of the ways that David’s final sepsis was almost inevitable with his compromised immune system and ineffective gal bladder.  There is so much here that I don’t mean to infer -- no blame, no caregiver bringing in infection, not even our own unintentional load of bacteria, etc, coming into his hospital room.  But @#$## (much more fun than writing out a curse word and I don’t even know what curse to use), I read this stuff and wonder at how slim his chance were.  How much so much was dependent on a string of miracles.  How many miracles we experienced but how many more were absolutely necessary.  And we did not know that.  We thought it was all science.

It was so much more.

And there are so many miracles that touch me and my loved ones every day.

I marvel at spirit.  I look up in wonder.