WHO WE ARE

We are Allison and Jeanie, full-time mom and grandma to our incredible girl, Bella, who is 5 and has Autism.

If you’re willing to search, there is an incredible amount of information on the subject of Autism, services available, various studies, random videos, etc. But we’ve been unable to find much in regards to what you might experience on a day to day basis. What has worked for other real, live people to handle the hourly challenges each day brings. We believe that every child is different, whether autistic or not, so what helped one person may not help another. But it would certainly be nice to have the information.

For us it was kind of like “every man for himself” with no one to talk to about it. We had no idea that Bella had Autism and didn't have a clue that there were actually signs that we didn't notice until years later when we found out more about the subject of Autism. Most of the official "case workers" or people who reviewed Bella were very sweet and helpful, but also very busy. And how do you even know what you should be asking when talking to a professional on the subject? We just found that parents of kids with autism have challenges and different things going on all day every day, that are often not what other parents experience.

While Bella is very chatty, you seldomly hear a word in all that "talking". So how do we know if she’s in pain or frustrated or how to help her?

It’s all well and good to google "how to get your kid to sleep all night". But what if the child’s body just wakes up after 5 hours and can’t relax for another 5 hours? Every day life is often quite different from the various rules and advices you read in texts about raising children.

And what about when you’re so frustrated you just want to cry? Not to mention the incredibly fun example of perfect manners and serene parenthood on the floor of isle 5 in the grocery store? Bella wouldn’t even go inside of any building, except for our house, for almost a year and would scream like we were torturing her if we tried it. No malls, no stores, no restaurants, no indoor play places, or anywhere else. All with her unable to tell us why. That’s over now and and we may still feel like hermits, but at least we’re hermits who can shop every once in a while!

We felt very alone doing the best we could, not wanting to bother friends with problems we knew they couldn’t help solve. You can feel inadequate when you see the photos of a child plastered all over a Facebook friend's page, who's already reading Shakespeare while riding a horse backwards on top of an airplane. Social Media often paints a false picture of peoples' lives, but whether true or false, it can certainly make you feel bad about yourself as a parent - not to mention your body, style or anything, and pretty much everything else.

Then there's the whole, "what did I do wrong"? "Is this my fault?" "Why did I get a C-Section?" "I should've breast fed." All of those incredibly negative and self-torturing things we sometimes get into. Well, one thing we can say with certainty now is that you can't change the past. Stay in the here and now and look to the future. What can we do now?

We’ve been through a lot of it. Every child is different and some have more challenges than others. We think that what has worked for us to help Bella become more healthy, happy and loving, more in control and more able in her every day life, is worth talking about -if any bit of it will help you to help those you love.

We’re not professionals or trained Autism specialists in any way. There are some very kind and competent people who are. We’re not medical doctors, but have found some very competent medical doctors who have and are still helping us. We’ll talk about school programs and medical programs for Bella, but those came from the professionals and your child’s health is something you should ask them about, not us. We’ll try to help you ask the right questions if we can. We consider ourselves professionals at loving our kids and doing whatever we can to give them a beautiful, productive life and future.

This has been quite a journey thus far and we’d like to go through it together, not alone. Maybe we’ll make more friends and get more help for Bella along the way.

-Allison & Jeanie