“I love you just as you are. I accept you as a blessing from God. I join with you today to be the partner of all my days, to be the mother of our children, to be the companion of my house; we shall keep together what share of trouble and sorrow our lives may lay upon us, and we shall hold together our store of goodness and plenty and love.

When our way becomes difficult, I promise to stand by you and uplift you, so that through our union we can accomplish more than we could alone. I promise to honor and care for you, to speak the truth to you in love, and to cherish and encourage your own fulfillment through all the changes of our lives. I will stand beside you in joy or in sorrow, in ease and in conflict, putting the commitment we make today above any obstacle that we may face.

This is my solemn vow.”

These are the vows I made to my wife almost six years ago.

In the midst of all the strains of all the effort all of us put forth for our children, reminding yourself of the vows you made to your spouse can help you reclaim some perspective - on this day in particular for me. We can give so much to our children and all the day-to-day administrivia of our lives that everything turns into effort. It’s easy to lose track of joy.

When you’re ear-deep in evaluations, preschool planning, therapies, preschools, research, reading, phone calls and e-mails, work, home therapies and activities, and God-knows-what-else, and then you lack enough sleep and energy to make sense of even half of it, it’s easy to assume marriage will just work itself out along the way.

This is not a healthy assumption. There’s a reason why the divorce rate for people with special needs children are so high. It’s very hard, very consuming work, and it’s easy to lose track of your relationship in the middle of it. This is one of the essential parts of Mother’s Day they tend to forget on the cards.

Today, I give eternal thanks that I was able to marry my best friend in all the world to be the mother of our perfect little boy, and that together we have been given all the gifts and joys he brings to our life together.

I give even more thanks for the joy she brought to my life before he was born, and how that joy has multiplied each day since.

When I see her hold him, I get goose-bumps - every time. I see him kiss her and I know everything is right with the world.

I would also be remiss if I did not celebrate the fact that 2 1/2 years ago, this Wonder Woman gave birth ‘the old-fashioned way’ to a 9 lb 4 oz, 21 1/2″ long, 99.99th percentile head-sized boy. After he was out, she did everything but jump on the table and flex her biceps. I’m still in awe.

Today I commit to work harder to not be an ass so much of the time.

Today I vow to do a better job remembering that we are literally three-in-one, that you are the partner of all my days, the mother of our children, the companion of my house. I will stand beside you in joy or in sorrow, in ease and in conflict, putting the commitment we make today and every day above any obstacle that we may face.

This is my solemn vow.

[Ed. note - This boy loves his keyboard!]

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This is a VERY LONG post about cooking. The only thing it has to do with autism is this: when your child is self-entertaining, it’s easier to cook while he’s around, because you don’t have to worry about him being all on top of you - because he can entertain himself (although there was a point Saturday night when I was in bed trying to figure out what the song running through my head was, and realized it was from the keyboard that played in the background all day).

Luckily, Tim realized it was ‘The Big Cook’ weekend, and planned his work accordingly so he could spend extra time with the J-Man. Oh, and that sometimes we run out of time to make a ‘fresh’ dinner because we’re running around with therapies and whatnot, and that’s when it’s great to be able to pull out something frozen and quickly reheat it. I love the microwave for that.

This past weekend, I did what we call ‘The Big Cook.’ It’s the reason we have two cabinets full of Gladware individual serving containers. Here’s how it works:

* The week before: sit down with a yellow note pad and come up with a list of foods you want to make. These should all be easily divisible into portion sizes and freeze and thaw well. Write down ingredients needed for each recipe, then add like together. For example, I ended up needing NINE POUNDS of ground beef total!

* Thursday night: make lists - we made the Costco list, the Super Target list, and the Harris Teeter list. We knew we could get meats and some larger sizes of canned goods at Costco, but didn’t want to buy a flat of 12 cans of diced tomatoes for example. That’s what the Super Target list was for. The Harris Teeter list was for the things we couldn’t get at the other two stores. HT is much more expensive, so I go there last.

* Friday immediately after work: load up into the car and go to Costco, list in hand. Buy most meats, that 105 oz can of crushed tomatoes, a new monitor for me, laundry and dishwasher detergents, and the best thing ever found at Costco: a red stapler.

* Friday night after putting J-man down: go to Super Target and get that list’s worth of stuff.

* Friday night after Super Target: Divide hamburger into portions needed for recipes, freezing the other 3 lbs in bags for later use, using your new digital kitchen scale. Rhapsodize about how much you like your new scale.

* Chop onions and garlic, and fry with 4 lbs of hamburger; drain. Add to giant stock pot, along with 105 oz can of crushed tomatoes, plus another 28 oz can, and lots of Italian spices (oregano, basil, parsley). Taste. Add more salt. Have Tim taste. Add a few cubes of frozen homemade pesto. Portion into many containers, label, and have Tim take out to the deep freeze in the garage, because the garage is also home to the giant cockroach, and seeing it skitter makes me shivery. WASH THE POTS.

* Saturday morning: instead of sleeping in, get up and start cooking again! Take one of the two chickens, and put into the giant stock pot. Cover with water. Put on the back burner, and let it boil for an hour or so.

1. While that’s cooking, chop onions, garlic, and green peppers for sloppy joes, hotdog chili, chicken chili, and penne bake.
2. Put onions, garlic, chicken broth, spices, hot sauce, and frozen chicken thighs into crock pot for chicken chili. Turn on and forget about it.
3. Brown hamburger, onions, garlic, and green peppers for sloppy joes; transfer to other stock pot, and add tomato sauce ingredients to it.
4. Brown hamburger, onions, and garlic for penne bake; drain. Put that into a container and into the fridge.
5. Brown hamburger and onions for hotdog chili; drain. Make hotdog chili while sloppy joes mix is simmering.
6. Remove chicken from stock pot, and refrigerate. Pour off chicken stock into big containers. Repeat process with the second chicken!
7. SHOWER, you stinky person!
8. Containerize (OK, seriously, Word thinks ‘containerize’ is an actual word,) both the sloppy joe mix, and the hotdog chili, and place in garage freezer. Clean out garage freezer so more can fit. Make SURE you label everything - we just use masking tape and a pen.
9. Make the first batch of chicken and dumplings. This is a long and arduous process that I hate, but we love chicken and dumplings, so I make them, but only on The Big Cook weekends.
10. Wash the pot, so you can use it for chicken chili: dump everything from the crock pot into it, shred the chicken, then add 4 assorted cans of beans, 2 cans of corn, and lots of cilantro. Stir and containerize.
11. Eat PB&J for dinner. Never want to look at cooked food again.
12. Put J-man down for the night - and have Tim separate the meats you bought at Costco into individual servings - freeze those as well.
13. Make the other batch of chicken and dumplings. Force Tim to come downstairs and help with the dumplings. Containerize everything and make Tim take them out to the garage. Realize we are now out of individual-size containers. Put one giant container in the fridge. Cram pots into dishwasher and run it.
14. Moan about feet hurting until Tim rubs them. Sleep like death.

* Sunday morning: up to make the 3 pans of penne bake. Reheat container of hamburger mix you refrigerated yesterday - add mushrooms you just chopped, and diced tomatoes and spices and let simmer.

1. Fire up the giant stock pot to make 8 cups of penne. While that’s cooking, go ahead and chop the onions, celery, and green peppers for gumbo, and the onions and garlic for spinach/onion quiche.
2. Freeze the gumbo veggies in freezer bags since you don’t have any more individual containers, so the gumbo will have to wait, but now you’ve done the hard part.
3. Make cheese sauce for penne bake. Put 3 pans of penne bake in the oven.
4. SHOWER, stinky!
5. Containerize the penne bake in bigger containers, consoling yourself that you’ll probably have that for dinners, so won’t need the individual-size containers.
6. Chop up the ‘meat for stew’ into smaller pieces, and freeze in bags for later. We throw a couple pounds into a crock pot with some soups, cook all day, and serve over rice. It doesn’t have to be cooked beforehand since it’s so easy.
7. Make spinach/onion quiche and bake. Cool, slice, and freeze 2 slices each in freezer bags for quick lunches. (I was going to make a ‘quickie/quiche’ joke, but figured you had already thought of it.)
8. Marvel at the state of the freezer. It’s FULL!
9. Take a couple containers of food over to a friend’s house - three of the four of them (including both adults) are sick, or have wrist issues that preclude cooking.
10. Make marinade for ham, and put it together with the ham in the fridge for overnight.

* Collapse on couch. Fold four loads of laundry done during the cooking ‘downtime.’

* Get J-man ready for bed.

* Soak feet. Even though you knew to wear shoes all day, your feet are still killing you.

Today I still need to bake the ham, and I truly would have made gumbo if we weren’t out of containers. I thought about going to buy some more, but just couldn’t do it. At least ham is easily freezable in freezer bags. I was also going to make 10 lbs worth of garlic/onion mashed potatoes, but again, no containers. I actually MAY go buy some, since potatoes will go bad. What? You didn’t think you could freeze potatoes? The only issue people have with that is the texture, and since in this case they are mashed, the texture isn’t affected.

That, my friend, is ‘The Big Cook.’ It will be a LONG TIME before I cook anything complicated again, and that’s the beauty of it.

Hints for your own big cook:

• WEAR SHOES. Your feet will hurt less.
• Clear the counters and make sure all the pots are clean the night before. You will need the room!
• Double, even triple, recipes. (Or in the case of spaghetti sauce, quadruple) It doesn’t take much longer to chop two onions instead of one, and saves you from having to do a big cook that much longer.
• Be able to multi-task.
• Label everything. Trust me: hotdog chili looks like spaghetti sauce, which looks like chili with beans, and they all sort of look like veggie soup.
• Use pockets of time where something is cooking to accomplish other things, like doing laundry, or chopping onions/garlic/green peppers for other recipes. Or, use a chopper/food processor. I didn’t use my mini chopper this time, because I knew I would only have room on the counters for a few things at a time, and anyway, I kind of like chopping,
• Wash as you go.
• Have someone available to rub your feet at the end of the day.

The Holland Tourism Board would like a word with you…

If you’ve ‘gone public’ with having a special needs child for about this side of 37 minutes, odds are stellar that someone has sent you the “Welcome to Holland” poem by Emily Perl Kingsley. For the uninitiated, click that link and go read it. I’ll wait.

While it’s not as controversial a topic among parents as say vaccines, you’ll still get a wide range of reactions and emotions about it, and those may change drastically depending on the mood they’re in at any given moment.

Regardless of what I say next, most people who have sent it to us have done so out of concern and love for us. To them I say, I appreciate you more than you know, and I hope you’ll understand that the emotions of parents of autistic children are complex, varied, and wild. And we get more honest about that as time goes on.

At first I hated that poem. Then I felt like I got it. Then I felt like the poet was a bad parent and I cursed her name to the darkness (I was bitter then - duh). Then I kinda got it again. Now I have a completely different reaction to it:

What the hell did Holland do to deserve this?

I’ve never been to Holland or Italy, and beyond one having the Pope’s house in the middle of it and the other having a higher population of blond women, I don’t know what the primary pros and cons are. I have no clue why the plane full of all the special needs kids and families got rerouted to Holland, except perhaps the flight attendants thought the screaming indicated a potential terrorist threat.

Luckily, I’m not alone in this wondering. A funny reply came in the form of “Holland Schmolland” by Laura Krueger Crawford. Apparently a cottage industry of these things is popping up.

Then I found “Welcome to Beirut,” by Susan F. Rzucidlo, which is utterly brilliant. It’s got me wanting to write my own.

In the end, I only have one reaction to the Holland poem, and I think this one is here to stay. Neither Italy nor Holland nor all the countries in the world combined can hold a candle to our son.

Our house can range from idyllic to insane, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Not even all the artwork in Italy together could impress me more than what my son struggles to create with crayons and computer paper. The art on our walls at home is the symbol of all the hard work he’s put into overcoming his challenges. He is our masterpiece.

Rzucidlo lasers in on one of the biggest truths I’ve learned so far when she says, “You will know sorrow like few others and yet you will know joy above joy.” We celebrate every little step, no matter how small. We give thanks to all those parents who’ve gone ahead of us and given us roads to follow. We feel affirmed by those parents who see us go to tears when he says a new word and know why. We rejoice for the gifts given to us by skilled, committed, kind-hearted therapists who work for pay far less than the weight-in-gold salaries they deserve.

We have very high highs and really low lows, but between that vast expanse, we see all the little details of the world. I sit and stare at the sky because he does. I discover microscopic pieces of dirt in the carpet just because he does. I wonder what all I would miss if he didn’t show them to me.

One more thing I’ve learned - There are a lot of good and kind people in this world, and we’ve only just begun to meet them. We wish our son didn’t have to struggle like he does, but he is accepting it with bravery and grace and determination. We can do no less.

We are a very kind and gentle family towards each other in general. We are polite towards each other – we drop “pleases” and “thank yous” around here like they are nothing. If we disagree, we try to discuss the issue rather than scream at each other (although sometimes the discussions can get heated!). Right now, we aren’t being as kind and gentle toward each other. We’re sniping and being sarcastic during the day, although at night when we lie in bed and talk, we are very sensitive to the other’s needs.

As I have mentioned, I read a lot. I’m re-reading old favorites – books that I know will comfort me. I know where the hard parts of the stories are, and I can easily skip to the good parts. How I wish that life could be like that sometimes. I’m sure everyone does.

Right now, I’m re-reading Betsy’s Wedding* and have gotten to the place where Betsy is writing her Rules for Married Life. “Always, always, be gentle and loving. No matter if you’re tired or feeling cross.” That’s something we have to remember right now.

It’s very easy to let ourselves take out our anger and frustration on each other, and I’ve decided I will not let that happen.

(*Betsy’s Wedding is the final book in the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. They are books describing a girl growing up in an idealized early 1900s Minnesota. They are wonderful escapism if you like “happily ever after” types of books.)

We’re working on a ‘manifesto’ so visitors and participants on the site will know the kind of community we’re trying to build here. Consider this a first draft. We’ll add more I’m sure!

Here are some rules:

• Thou shalt be respectful to every parent here.
• Thou shalt be thyself at all times. We aren’t super-parents; we’re human. Being honest will help you; holding it in won’t.
• Thou shalt laugh at thyself. It’ll make you feel better.
• Thou shalt ask questions. There are stupid questions in this world, but it’s been our experience that parents of kids with these sorts of needs don’t ask them.
• If thou doth wisheth to offer advice, doeth it constructively or shuteth thy hole.
• Thou shalt value thy children regardless of what they are going through. Thou may be having a day where thou’d rather send them off with the gypsies, and that’s fine. Thou can do that (feel like sending them off, not actually doing it, though) and still love them.
• Thou shalt celebrate thy children’s hard-earned achievements, no matter how small. However, if it involves doing the Riverdance, thou might want to closeth thy blinds.
• Thou shalt not be a horse’s ass.
• Thou shalt always be an advocate for thy children.
• Thou shalt never give up.
• Thou shalt go to Italy, regardless of what that poem says. Thou wilt have to change planes in Holland anyway, trust me.

Here’s what we believe:

• There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with our child or yours. He or she may be struggling to overcome some or many things, but our children are perfect just as they are.
• We will do what is necessary to help our child reach his or her full potential, whatever that is.
• We know more about our child than anyone else. We will not blindly accept the judgments of others, no matter how ‘expert’ they may be.
• We will, however, listen to any and all advice given to us. We reserve the right to use it, adapt it to our needs, or ignore it and make fun of it.
• We are perfectly fine with people asking us questions about our son and all the therapies we go to. There is a lot of information to share and learning from each other is how we become better parents. In the rare cases where the questioner is trying to reinforce their belief that all parents with special needs kids are weird or must be doing something wrong, I will instruct my son to go take a whiz on your front door.
• We will work to be OK with not being perfect. We will work to be OK with not being OK with not being perfect. And so on.
• People who ignore our experience and understanding of our child, treat us like idiots, and think they know more than we do about him just because they have a long string of initials after their name can go to hell.
• You have our permission to say “bite me” or be sarcastic to anyone who makes an idiotic comment to you in public. Example: “No, I never thought about talking to my child more. We decided before we had children that we were all going to become mimes.”
• Never use a big word when profanity will do.
• Anyone who judges our children, says anything derogatory about them, or makes fun of them will get their ass kicked and their name taken. Once time travel is invented, we will go back in time and smack their parents, too.
• Parents who can affirm each other with all their flaws and foibles and be supportive and understanding in the midst of all the emotions that come with this are the best people we know. We love you!

To borrow the famous philosophers’ words, “Be excellent to each other. And, party on, dudes!”