Londyn's Story
Londyn's Story
Crusing Along! 5 Months Post Spica
One of the most awesome things about Spica Life and this blog has been meeting other DDH moms and being part of a community of people who understand what you are going through. Since Londyn was given the all-clear for awhile at her last appointment, Kyle and I were hoping to find some people to pass along our spica gear to. I was thrilled when I received a message from Kathleen, a mom who is also a nurse who had read my blog and lived in WI too. We ended up chatting and long story short, I was able to meet her, her husband and sweet daughter Elizabeth, who is now the cutest spica baby and the new owner of our beloved spica chair! Kathleen gave me some photos of Elizabeth to share; she was rocking a festive red spica for the holidays, and she just got a new purple one! They are doing a fantastic job riding the waves of the journey to healthy hips.
Through our online community, we have also been able to find new homes for some clothes that work well with the spica, our spica-friendly baby carrier, Londyn’s abduction brace and even the pink poodle rocker that Londyn loved so much. It’s been therapeutic for me to pass these items on to other families, both for me to move on and to in a very small way lend a helping hand to other families.
Londyn is just about 18 months old and the spica is a bit of a distant memory now. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes by Frances Hodges Burnett, author of The Secret Garden: “It is astonishing how short a time it can take for very wonderful things to happen.” Londyn is seamlessly standing from sitting, sitting from standing, crawling faster than ever, and gingerly cruising along furniture. She is doing her best to keep up with the big brother, even trying to follow him on the inflatables at Monkey Joe’s the other day. We just recently discovered Londyn will actually walk when she’s holding our hands, or even just using the wall for balance! In the last few weeks she has really taken off with her mobility.
Just the other day I was finishing Londyn’s baby calendar when I realized that she only has 3 milestone stickers left to reach! There were times during her DDH journey that I dismally felt the whole page of stickers didn’t apply to her!
It hit me today how all of this good has come out of our spica journey so far: connecting with other families, realizing needs that aren’t being met in the medical field, and raising awareness for hip dysplasia to name a few. It’s profound to me because in half a second I can go back to the mom I was at the start of this- bawling in the orthopedic surgeon’s bathroom, fighting the blinding panic of my daughter’s diagnosis. And though it hasn’t been easy, it has certainly been a transformative year.
I want to leave you with this beautiful excerpt from The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding. A mother in my DDH support group shared this on our page and I had to repost it. Though I hesitate to say I’m parenting a child with a disability, the feelings described in this essay resonate with me in many ways, and eloquently approach this difficult subject.
“I’m often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability, 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, board the plane, and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess says, ‘Welcome to Holland’.
”‘Holland!?’ you say. ‘What do you mean, Holland?? I 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. You’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. You will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met. It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for awhile and you catch your breath, you look around and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills... and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
”Yet everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy, and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. For the rest of your 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 that dream is a very, very significant loss. But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t go to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland.”
—Emily remembering 1987”
