My Wonderland

 I am a “yes” mum… not in the cringey way, but in the I want my disabled child to have every experience kind of way. My kids know this... Dante does try to milk it, but I'm no fool! Everything within reason, obviously. I'm not completely unhinged. But generally, when my kids come to me and ask if they can try something, my first instinct isn't to shut them down and go on to list all the reasons why they can't. It's.... 'Okay, how do we make this happen? Is it realistic?' And when it comes to Kaedyn, sometimes the how takes a little more work, but I'm always up for a challenge. Ice skating? Kaedyn figured that out on his own! Boots on, we may just need a lower-profile seat cushion so his feet can fully slide on the ice, but the music, the freedom, the chill, definitely my child! I skated as a kid, and I'm loving that my boys also enjoy being on the ice, so much so that now Dante is well into Ice Hockey! But for Kaedyn, my mind goes...Okay. What equipm...

 Welcome to my blog, otherwise known as the place I dump my emotional baggage😖 So last week, for approximately the 15,000th time, Kaedyn’s wheelchair decided it was going to throw a tantrum. This inevitably led to me having a full-blown crashout that nobody quite knew how to respond to. I don’t lose my shit like that often, especially not in front of my kids, but I was ropeable. Seeing red. Feeling every single emotion that comes with being a mum whose child relies on AT to get through his day. And when he misses out... I get feral. It’s just the way I’m built. So we had a complete battery failure. The spare battery wasn’t coming to the party either, and I was raging hard!! The reason being... Kaedyn had his first school excursion that same day. They were taking public transport to Bunnings, which was meant to be this fantastic, fun-filled day. I was ready to pack the spare battery, have the other battery fully charged, and send him on his way. It was meant to be one of those mome...

Okay, so today started off absolutely amazing. We had so much fun hanging out with some of our favourite people at Outback Splash. We even managed to leave at a decent time, keeping our special needs kids in mind and all the fatigue and everything that comes with that! Anyway, we planned to go to BurgerFreak for dinner, so the plan was to head home for showers first. Kaedyn had a little accident in the car, so we got him straight onto his ShowerBuddy to get him cleaned up with Phil. I was on car duty, making sure everything was sorted and the car didn’t smell like wee. All was good! I hopped in the shower after that, mid-shampoo, when I thought I heard Dante screaming at an online game. Turns out, that wasn’t it. Phil was finishing up with Kaedyn and pushing the ShowerBuddy over the threshold from the tiles to the carpet. That’s when it became apparent that the sliding clip that usually secures the commode hadn’t caught properly. It slipped back about 2 inches. We usually have to give ...

Being an author can look and sometimes even feel like such a mundane thing, that isn't really a job, it's just something someone 'does'. It’s very easy to reduce it to words on a page or screen accomoanied by late nights and cold coffee. From the outside, it doesn’t always look extraordinary... But if you stop and you look at who is writing, you will see there are people like Kaedyn — pouring his entire lived experience into his story, shaped by a lifetime of therapy, resilience, and courage far beyond his years. You think of Jess, writing through a stage four brain cancer diagnosis, choosing to leave behind something meaningful, something lasting, even in the face of the unimaginable. Rising to the challenge like a gladiator to set an example for others by guiding not belittling. Or Sam whose work and advocacy for inclusion, and her unwavering commitment to Fletch, ripples far beyond anything that could ever be considered “mundane.” And suddenly, writing isn't smal...

So, following up on my last post… I may or may not have bombarded that particular council with online enquiries and phone calls👀 BUT!! finally — progress. I received a response today. While the information I’d originally been given was true, there had been no attempt to fix the issue or treat it with any urgency. The manager I spoke with wasn’t even aware of the situation and had to go away and check everything himself. Honestly, it’s frustrating when accessibility concerns get met with a quiet “meh, not my problem” attitude😔 But — credit where it’s due.  The conversation that followed was productive. I expressed my concerns around independence, about swimming lessons coming up later this year, and how accessibility can’t be something addressed at the last minute. Families like ours don’t get the luxury of scrambling for solutions a week before an activity starts. Planning ahead isn’t what I do for fun (I don't know what I do for fun anymore 😂) it's just something that feels...

 Well… bear with me folks, I have updates😂 First of all, the first two weeks of high school have been wonderful!! Kaedyn has made some gorgeous new friends, he’s feeling calm, settled, and we’ve noticed such a significant shift in his mood that afternoons are no longer a full stew of stress. Last year looked very different... Home and therapy became Kaedyn’s safe places to let everything out,  sometimes becoming his punching bags too. School just wasn’t lighting him up anymore; he was ready for something that felt more mature, more his pace. So the rest of us learned to step back and let him work through that defiance… He’s even been willing to negotiate his scale of niceness towards Kal… (and to be clear, Kal is the absolute nicest — Kaedyn just happens to find encouragement deeply suspicious.) He's been loving his new OT, Sam, and is quite happy to kick me out and lay all the goss on her... It's my guess that he's talking shit about all of us hahaha Of course, there h...