Community Support

This weekend I was reading through a packet of information from "The Virginia Project for Children and Youth with Dual Sensory Impairments/Deaf-Blindness". They were talking about how it's important to have community support and how isolating yourself is the worst possible thing you could do for a kid who's already dual-sensory impaired. I totally agree with this and we try really hard to do a ton of stuff with Noah. Sometimes, though, I think I try to do too much myself. I want Noah to interact with the people and things around him, but only on my terms. I don't want him to feel rejected, but I also don't want him to miss out on experiences just because I'm not willing to take a risk.

I resolved to give other people more of a chance, and my opportunity came today. I was at a VBS planning meeting at church and when the director asked if there were any more questions I asked what we were doing to make sure that the special needs kids at our church were being included in VBS to the fullest extent. We had a nice discussion about ways we could include them and I'm happy to report that Noah will be participating almost fully in VBS this year. He will have a full time aid (a high school student) who will make sure that he doesn't walk into any walls and will repeat directions so that he can hear them even though the environment will be noisy. The only thing he won't be participating in is snacktime, but the aid will bring him to me so that he won't starve. I'm really excited for this because I think it will benefit not only Noah but also the other special needs kids in our church. People were so willing to help and all agreed that of course we needed to do whatever we could to make sure Noah was included. I knew there was a reason why I loved my church so much!