Community Chat

[raven-blackbird]

The thread on Favorite Gift.........I started thinking about the things the kids and hubs had given me..........but one stood out...........not for it's value, it's a very inexpensive gift.......but for the work, effort, tears, all the stuff that went into it.....over years and years..........the gift was a simple little necklace........engraved on it was Proud Lieutenants Mom.........it was son the cops way of telling me he had gotten another promotion.......he's the youngest Lieutenant in the department...........I was sooooooooo proud of him and am wearing my necklace as I type this.............but as I watched the kids and grandkids, my memories drifted back to him and how he started life...........he was born with a heart condition, three holes through the Ventricular Septal wall........he had asthma.........and he was allergic to all antibiotics.........lived with ear infections the first two years of his life........we were constantly in the ER........at least two trips per month.........and as we got past all the medical stuff we thought life was pretty good.............till he hit third grade and I noticed something just wasn't right.............I couldn't read what he wrote...........fought the school about it, they said I was overly concerned, it would all come together.........I didn't buy it..........so I had him tested on my own.........audio neurological disorder, he was dyslexic.........ahhhhhhhh it all made sense now, he had the worst time with phonics, but you have to hear to do phonics but you have to hear in a certain way.........he didn't...........so I found a school that taught kids with this problem but taught them phonics the same was you teach the deaf to speak..........not by what you hear but what you feel.......where your tongue is at, what your lips do, your breath..............and he began to excel in school...........this child was tenacious........I saw the same tenacity in him every day of his life...........from those days in the hospital as he lay in his bed, in grammar school as he tackled the dreaded spelling test.......to xmas night as he handed me that necklace..........he and I have a long history together of knocking down barriers.............it may be an inexpensive necklace to some...........but to me it's priceless...........................raven