This week Deliver the Dream travels to Live Oak, Florida for a retreat weekend for families who have a child with an autism spectrum disorder or a related disability.  We look forward to this retreat all year long!  Each year this is a challenging but rewarding experience.  It requires many volunteers who have expertise working with children who have special needs.  It is amazing to provide these families an opportunity where their kids can be in a nurturing environment and feel "normal" for a bit. This weekend will allow families to meet others going through similar circumstances and day to day challenges. This weekend helps families forget about the every day stresses, embrace each other as a family, and rekindle spirits through fun, therapeutic activities all weekend long.  We have an amazing group of staff, volunteers and families ready to go! This will be a weekend to remember.

Welcome to Holland

 By Emily Pearl Kingsley

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability---to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel.  It’s like this….

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip—to Italy.  You buy a bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans, the Coliseum, the Michelangelo David, the gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting. 

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives.  You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands.  The flight attendant comes and says, “Welcome to Holland!”

“Holland?!” you say.  “What do you mean, Holland?”  “I’ve signed up for Italy!  I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine, and disease.  It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guidebooks.  And you must learn a whole new language.  And you will meet a whole new group of people you would have never met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around, and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills, Holland has tulips, Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going to Italy, and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of you life, you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go, that’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever go away, because the loss of a dream is a very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never

be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.