I’m sitting here just in alll of my feels… what’s new 🤣🤣 I’m going to talk about something slightly heavy for me. About Elle getting older and not having friends yet. To clarify, she has so many cousins who freakin love her, and other children in our world, but she doesn’t understand. She’s 6….. but she’s more like 3…she’s for sure a threenager. I swear soon I’ll post a happy happy post. But for now, this is where I am after Easter weekend.

First I’m going to start off by saying, we had a wonderful family weekend…. On Sunday, we found our Easter baskets.. Elle was quite terrified that there was an actual bunny in our home… it was pretty funny. She did not want to leave the house as usual. We drove separate cars to my families house, we always do this in case someone needs to leave with Elle. She hid in her cousins bed most of the time. But ended up having the best time hunting eggs with her family. It was a perfect morning surrounded by family and love and mimosas.

We went to our friends for an egg hunt Saturday. We had such a nice day. All together as a family. That’s super rare. My kids raged. I got to chat with friends. They were all supportive and knew what a big special deal it was for Elle to be a part of this day. It was freakin wonderful. At one point when Elle was playing on the playground, she just shoved through two kids to the bar swing, saying a string of words over and over that we couldn’t understand, and took over….. the older friend was very kind. I chased after Elle and said, “No no Elle, we need to wait our turn.”

The older girl said, “Oh, it’s ok she can take over.”Then she said, “Why doesn’t she talk to us?” And another sweet little girl said, “Yea she never wants to play with us.” I smiled and just said- “Even though Elle’s really big, she’s got a different brain. She’s something we call special needs. And even though she’s big and 6, it’s like she’s 3.” They both just said, ohhhh ok. The totally understood once I said that..They weren’t even phased. They just processed it for a second and went about running wild. I just smiled and put my sunglasses back on and tried to hold back my tears… I just said these words a couple of weeks ago…….

We are at a weird stage. When Elle was younger, she looked like all of the other toddlers. You couldn’t totally see her differences if you weren’t in our immediate circle of humans. The older she gets, the more noticeable her differences are….. to the outside world… Her cousins,who are years younger than her, are starting to pass her by with speech and things and life. Leap frogging is the term for it. It’s just… well it’s sad as f*@k to be quite honest. Kids and people in general just don’t understand why she’s ignoring them or screaming bloody murder,why she just wants to be alone and shouts space at anyone she sees, or why I’m sitting on the floor at a grocery store holding her until she’s regulated again. I find myself way more often these days saying, “Oh I’m so sorry, she’s just special needs.” Just special needs….. it doesn’t make sense to people to see these actions from a big 6 year old child…. The world is hard.

School. It makes me cry a shit ton. Soon school will get its own blog post. Very very soon…but first, some background. I hang out with Elle every morning until the bell rings and I set her up in her room at her desk before I leave campus. I just love all of the little kids. There’s a certain little girl who loves to chat with me everyday. Elle usually spends our time before the bell rings hiding in a bathroom stall instead of outside with the other kids. Anyways, She came up to me a couple of weeks ago, Elle was spinning circles and chatting away and laughing to herself, and my little friend said, “ Is Ellie crazy? She screams a lot in class. She tries to take her clothes off on the playground if she gets wet. She doesn’t come inside to eat lunch with us.And she never wants to play with us when we ask her.” Man- kids a brutal. Kids are honest. Kids are curious. I just told her Elle’s brain is just different and she’s special needs. The sweet girl just smiled and said ohh. She didn’t understand. And I just smiled away as her and another kid just watched Elle doing her thing… just staring at her…and I cried the entire drive home.

Her best friend is a 27 year old. She’s basically now part of our family. My kids all love her dearly. We shall call her Auntie T for our blogging purposes. And man- she’s one of the few people Elle asks for, who can soothe her, and who is a total safe space for her. My friends kids that are Elle’s age are having slumber parties, going to birthday parties, and playing sports. And I’m over here trying to get my girl to sleep through the night. Trying to get her to be able to dress herself. And trying to get her to use the toilet independently. I feel like something that’s a positive for us, Elle’s the last baby in our family…. Since I can’t have more children… She always will be. I won’t watch and experience what the heavy sadness as a younger sibling passes by her in all aspects of life except for age will feel like. Seeing her be passed up by cousins and our friends children is… is something really soul crushing for me right now….. I’m trying to work through it…… it’s like I’m feeling immense grief sometimes. It comes in waves.. it’s a weird feeling to be living in this state of grief, yet happy beautiful life we have. It feels fucked up for me to be feeling and thinking like this. But it’s just how I feel. It’s unexplainable.

I’ll tell you guys what though. This. This is all MY insecurities and MY pain. Not Elle’s. Elle is freakin happy. She is often just singing and dancing and smiling while out in the world…. Acting out movie scenes. And while running through our home….and this sense of not knowing she’s different…well,I hope and pray that’s how my precious girl will be forever. I don’t know if it will be forever. I do have an immense sense of hope she will progress. I’ll do whatever it takes in life to make sure she’s forever happy. My happy, happy, forever little girl. The holidays are hard. We have changed what they look like in our home to accommodate our girl. We are finding what works for us. Things look different for us from what they used to. But boy, it sure is magical 🩷

PS- this was the first Easter that Elle hunted eggs and she loved it!