Stress

For this mother, it is finals time. This happens two times a year, a time when my stress level is maxed out by trying to show that even though I am a few years older and have far more responsibility than they do, I can be just as smart as the rest of the post-high school crowd that I attend class with. I still have yet to figure out the perfect stress reliever for myself, and I get angry a lot at myself for not being able to be that parent who has nothing else going on in their lives other than their child. Sadly, everything is irritating me now, because it seems as though for every step forward I take, I end up two back. And what makes it worse on me is that Mother's Day is the Sunday before finals, so I will be cranky on a day when I am supposed to be happy. I know that it is normal to feel like a failure as a parent from time to time, but this feeling can really end at any time now...

One of the things that has been stressing me out during this time is getting Alex into a speech therapy program over the summer. This has proven to be a pain in my a** for a couple of reasons: One, the lack of people at the hospital to call me back, after I have left multiple messages. For two weeks I have been calling and calling, trying to talk to an actual human being in the speech therapy department, and have gotten their answering service every time. Then, when they finally got the clue that I was angry, the lady tried to pawn me off on another hospital, tried to say that the lady who had openings was not helping out people like Alex (this is without even asking if he had made any progress in the YEAR that it had been since she seen him last), and then she apologized for the scheduler AND the receptionist for the department being gone that day, even though it is the MIDDLE OF THE WEEK. She said she would have someone call me tomorrow, and if tomorrow comes and goes and I hear nothing, I promise that I will call them and let them know that even though they think of Alex as just another autistic kid, the people around him do not, and they are the ones who have seen how amazing he is doing.

In the mean time, we have been using the flash cards that I bought him and I even got him the Leapfrog TAG, which is the pen that can read to him. I can't wait to get him more books, because after fighting with it for a while, he finally understood that this pen can read to him, so now he goes through the book that was in the box with the pen five or six thousand times a day. We also have the feeling chart, where it shows pictures of the different emotions and will help Alex to learn how to describe how he is feeling.

This momma is ready for this semester to be over. Ready to be put under to get my tonsils taken out so what I can have a reason to just rest for a while. Since Tony and I's 2 year anniversary is coming up, maybe I will be well enough around that time where he and I can just spend some relaxing time together and that will help out my stress a little.