Additional Needs

A Child’s Happiness

Posted by Amy Sweeney on 4th July 2018 Additional Needs, Disabilities

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For this blog post I’m going to need the readers to use their imagination...

Just close your eyes and think...

You’re 2 and a half years old, your mind right now is like a sponge, taking everything in and all you want to do is explore the world!

“What’s that over there”

“what does that do”

“I need to go do that!”

“Mummy’s going over there, I’m going to see what she’s doing” but wait a minute...

You can’t, you know what you want to do so why is your body stopping you?

You see everyone else walking about, picking up toys and exploring the environment around them why can’t you do that?

You may be somewhere new and just want to run and hide behind mummy but you can’t.

You become confused, upset, frustrated.

That is the everyday reality for little Wilson.

His mind works in the same way as any other toddler, he can talk and has an amazing understanding of everything but physically isn’t able to sit up, crawl, move around, walk and even struggles with his hands with some tasks, it’s the one part of his brain that unfortunately became damaged when he was born prematurely.

Anyone who has a child (especially a boy!) will know that they get into EVERYTHING, they will turn your house upside down.

Sometimes you’ll get a bit annoyed with this and lose your patience after saying “please don’t do that!” for the 100th time that day, but imagine your child couldn’t do any of that...

You probably haven’t ever thought about it, you’ve never had to!

And I’ll be honest, I had genuinely never really heard of Cerebral Palsy before Wilson was diagnosed, I had never seen a child not being able to walk when they should be able to so I never even realised it was an issue for some!

The reality is that unfortunately it is, for thousands of children, Wilson being just one of them.

However, saying all this doesn’t mean I want people feeling sorry for my son, or feeling sorry for me or the people around him, because that is THE LAST thing I want.

What I want is for my son to be happy and despite all the difficulties he faces he IS happy and I’ll do everything in my power to ensure he always is.

Yes, he can get frustrated but I’ve always tried to not let him know that he is any different from anyone else his age.

He does know, I can tell he does but has never once questioned it to me.

We have been lucky enough to discover various different pieces of equipment to ensure he never gets left out of any activity that his big sister or friends at nursery are doing and things might take a bit longer to do but we always manage to find a way around it!

Let’s just say my arm muscles are very impressive from all the carrying around, but for as long as I physically can, I will run around the park with him chasing his big sister, I’ll carry him down to the kitchen so we can bake cakes, I’ll jump him up and down on the bouncy castle and I’ll take his splints and footwear off to let him splash in the water just to hear him laugh.

Such simple things but it’s these that matter the most because, as any parent will agree with me, your child’s happiness is the more important than anything else I can think of and if my child is happy then I’ve done something right.