All It Takes

These days my overall outlook, and mood, sways abruptly and severely from one side to the other. Optimism to pessimism. Encouraging to bleak. Joyful to depressed. When you invest so much time in 'training' someone, it's hard to separate yourself from the performance. As parents, we all experience this at various stages. I find it's exponentially more with Ruby than with my other two. The hours researching and implementing therapy strategies, the nights spent praying that tomorrow is 'the day' some skill emerges, the dollars spent on therapy sessions and materials...it all consumes so much of my time that when the wind slightly blows us off-course, I tend to crash. These are not good days, as Lehr would tell you. On these days, all it takes is one more instance of Ruby mis-articulating a word we've worked on forever, or acting out in a typical 3-year-old way for me to feel utter defeat. The metaphorical straw that broke the camel's back. It absolutely amazes me at how fragile I feel some days.

Thank God for the flip side. So many times I will be over the moon ecstatic because of something Ruby did, and when I tell someone about it, I will hear myself and think "this is so silly because it's so small". But I know it's not small - it's that word we've been working on forever, it's that skill that seems to always trip her up, it's that behavior that we have been trying to modify for as long as we can remember. When we have a breakthrough, nothing can tether me to the ground: I'm on top of the world.

Yesterday was one of those days. All it took was one of Ruby's therapists sitting in during her preschool class for one hour. All it took was her letting me know that Ruby talked a lot. All it took was her giving me the awesome news that Ruby was playing with friends - and they were playing back - on the playground. All it took was Ruby being her usual talkative self during Spanish to remind me that she can do it at school...just has to be where she chooses. All it took was Ruby using her mouth as best she can to form approximations of almost all of her classmates when we drilled their names before school. Yesterday was an amazing day.

That's all. It's the little things.