My Wonderland

Well... that was a day! We kind of won? I'm calling it a win. After months of emails and possibly 47 mental breakdowns later and 86 bitch fits we have a result. They're hiring a shower trolley for the duration of Kaedyn's swimming lessons. 🥳 Which is... exactly what I've been suggesting for months!👀 It was kind of a bizarre meeting. The amount of backpedalling was interesting, I was so focused on making sure I asked the right questions I didn't get a chance to be angry, I was just excited that I wouldn't have the break bad news to Kaedyn. Everyone was lovely, don't get me wrong, but there were definitely a few moments where I was thinking...'Interesting, because that's not what I've been hearing since February.🤨' and I know I'm not imagining that because there were like 10 of us in the email thread! BUT Kaedyn gets to swim with his friends, he has equal opportunity now and that's all I've cared about for the last 5months. The p...

I think I really spiralled tonight... I feel like I've  finally met the juggernaut that's been sitting at the end of this road, and for the first time in months, I genuinely wondered if giving up would be easier, simply because I'm exhausted! But giving up only gives me peace momentarily. It doesn't give Kaedyn anything. Someone would still have to tell him he can't attend swimming lessons and have to explain why the rest of his class gets to participate while he watches, and somehow... that's always me. I'm the one who has to explain why the world keeps asking him to be less complicated, just less in general. I don't ever want him to feel like he's too hard or inconvenient or undeserving of the opportunities presented to the child sitting next him. It's a fucking shower trolley!! I've spent months trying to solve something that should have taken a phone call and a purchase order. Tonight I kept digging, I chipped away through Facebook groups...

 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...