Within a week of getting the vitamin-D, Isaac’s speech had improved so dramatically that his speech therapist almost cried! I can’t begin to express the joy our family experienced celebrating this turning point with Isaac. He has worked so hard to get to this point, and although we still have a ways to go, we can see the end result approaching, and more importantly, he can too and it is motivating him to try even harder. These past few weeks are a testament to the long hours Heather spent doing speech homework with Isaac. Despite that, at our neuro’s suggestion, we still kept our appointment for the MRI.
As a parent of children with special needs, I think that setbacks are often the most discouraging part of our children’s journeys. We can go for days and weeks and months watching them make progress and believing they have mastered a skill, and during these periods, we begin to convince ourselves that all of the challenges are behind us. But just like Icarus, I tend to fly too high, and allow myself too much complacency. When the setback occurs, I tumble.
That’s the challenge—getting a smart, strong-willed boy to do hard work when he doesn’t want to. Heather and I know that if Isaac isn’t pushed to work on his speech delay, the problems he has now will only become more deeply ingrained and difficult to correct later on. While his speech delay does impact to a degree how he interacts with others—and I’m speaking here of those who are not with him all the time—his delay has not yet created an overall reduction in his quality of life. But that will change: classmates and teachers alike will grow to have less and less patience with listening to Isaac, which means that he will struggle to be really heard.
Being the parent of a child with special needs brings a particular set of challenges with it. There are the numerous doctors’ appointments, and specialists’ appointments, as well as trying to work “therapy” into everyday routines at home. Often, it seems like there isn’t enough time in the day, or the week, to get everything accomplished for my children that I’d like. This can be very frustrating, and it often makes me feel like a failure as a parent. But there is another, more insidious issue that can affect parents: the undiagnosed special need.
