Heaps upon heaps to hold my head up.

It's funny how when I most want comfort, I can't accept it.  When I most want to consider something done, I can't let it go. It's so easy to cultivate an attitude of perpetual activity and moderate  hopelessness, thinking that unless everything is done right, everything will go wrong.   And what does God do?   He heaps more assurances on our heads until finally I pause from my fretting, look around me, and see all my blessings heaped around me on the floor. 

This past week has been something of a blue funk.  Seth is leaving for the Netherlands soon, and just like when he went on deployment, I began to feel that awful detachment settle over me, the feeling that drives me helter skelter away from any weight or warmth of affection.  Everything seems more stressful the week before he leaves.  Plus we had been waiting for about two months to continue the testing process for Boogaloo, which means lots of questions and no answers with only my own researches for direction.  That's a lonely, stressful feeling too.  Lonely + stressed = depressed in my case, and by last Saturday, I was having moments when I doubted everything from the quality of my parenting to the security of my soul. 

But between that moment and Monday night, God has opened so many blessings in front of me that my blues were just forced to dissapate. 

I've been reading Nancy Wiseman's Could it be Autism?  and feeling more and more certain that no, it isn't ( blessing #1). Boogaloo doesn't demonstrate half the traits that she talks about.  In fact, I think Seth would like me to stop reading her book because I'm imbibing her  sense of urgency with hardly any of her reasons.  He finally talked me into waiting until after our appointment with the Early Intervention office this past Monday before I went madly searching for doctors of this and doctors of that to do a multi-disciplinary appraisal.  It helped that I switched books to When the Labels Don't Fit: A New (anti-diagnostical) Approach to Raising a Challenging Child  by Barbara Probst, which focuses on how biased a lot of testing is in regard to normality and desirable traits.

At any rate, Sunday night, the night before Boogaloo's appointment with Early Intervention, Sharry, the teacher who manages our church's preschool (a good friend) called me up.  She just wanted to let me know that she was so glad that I had gotten Boogaloo evaluated (blessing #2).  She had been thinking about mentioning testing to me but wasn't sure how to approach the subject (how does one approach that subject with an oblivious parent?).  She let me know that she had the highest opinion of the people at Early Intervention, mentioning one Anne in particular.  Then she told me the story of a little boy who had had something similar to what Boogaloo has a couple of years ago.  He went through the preschool with help, and now he's in a normal first grade with no help at all (blessing #3). 

So that's what I was processing when the Boogaloo, Seth, and I went to the ESD development center on Monday.  Lo and behold, the very Anne that Sharry mentioned by name was one of our evaluators (blessing #4), and she had so much good to say about Sharry that my heart lifted with each sentence. She said that if we chose to keep the Boo in a normal preschool, she would be the one working with her.  Boo wasn't especially happy to be there, but she behaved well enough to get compliments from both ladies (blessing #5).  We signed a bunch of paperwork, understood that any Early Intervention services are free (blessing #6), were able to report a bunch of small advances (blessing #7), and were done. 

I was expecting something a lot more intense.  I was expecting a lot more work for me to do in the next few weeks (the weeks when Seth is gone, and the Boo and I are preparing for two cross-country weddings and joining Seth in the Netherlands).  Nope, all preparations are now postponed until we get back (blessing #8) when we can meet with Boogaloo's teachers and get her settled into a real preschool setting.  In the meantime, travel, especially international travel, is supposed to open up worlds of improvement (no pun intended) in the minds of delayed children.  Our ladies at the EI office heartily approve of our summer plans (blessing #9), which takes a weight off of my mind.  And Anne is going to send me materials to help deal with the little difficulties in the meantime (blessing #10).

And those are only the blessings in regard to the Boogaloo and her condition.  I haven't mentioned the high school friend who materialized out of nowhere just in time to watch my dog (#11) or the sudden rise in the number of tutoring hours I've been picking up (#12) or the opening that God made for me to join a church praise team (#13) but not as a leader (#14) and only one of several praise teams (#15).  I find, in the midst of my blessings, that  I have no room for doubt.  There's still plenty of stress, fatigue, and distraction, but no doubt, and let's face it, doubt is the thing that really kills you.  Everything else is just a temporary burden that has to be born.