I’m Julie, mom to 4 (step, bio, adopt). We call it – “parenting three ways” – each with their own set of joys and challenges. By far, our biggest challenge (and sometimes our greatest joy) comes from parenting our special needs daughter. Our youngest, adopted from China at 20 months is now 9. She has an alphabet soup of diagnoses after her name, mostly in the emotional/behavioral/psychological arena. Honestly, we don’t know exactly what is wrong...it depends on who you ask. The “labels” that are fitting the best these days are Tourettes/OCD/ADHD (sometimes known as Tourettes Plus) and PDD-NOS (an autistic spectrum dx.)

Since adopting our daughter (let’s call her LuLu because sometimes we actually do), life in our household has been anything but “normal”. In fact, I just received a picture with this saying on it from a dear friend: “ Around here, NORMAL is just a setting on the washing machine.” That pretty much sums it up. About five years ago, it became obvious that our family needed to change from a two-career, two-income family to one where mom was around full-time for attaching, case managing and advocating for LuLu. The transition (I’m still very much the ugly ducking in this process) has not been an easy one, but has been a journey filled with incredible growth and has taught me more about myself, parenting, and the true essence of life than any other journey of my past 4 decades.

I have been extremely blessed to be surrounded by a great support system. My family is awesome and so much more swan-like than I usually seem to be and our church friends have been my moral rocks. My BTDT support system (other families raising special needs adopted children) are almost entirely in cyberspace, through a wonderful organization called Attachment Disorder Network (ADN), www.radzebra.org. I have also found great support and information through another listserve, www.attach-china.org. Both lists/websites have been invaluable lifelines to me and have information beyond just the diagnosis of Reactive Attachment Disorder.

So here I am, writing a blog about “parenting children with special needs”. My special needs parenting is still a work-in-progress, and I’m still in the throes of advocating for my daughter at school, searching for the right medical interventions, and dealing with the daily financial, emotional and physical challenges of it all. So, this blog will be full of information I’ve researched, paths I’ve traveled, challenges I’ve faced, and lessons I’m still learning. My fervent hope is that you will chime in with your experiences as well. The one thing I’ve learned more than any other is that those of us with special needs children often feel totally alone in our journeys. This isolation is dangerous, and the truth of the matter is, regardless of our child’s labels, we are very much in this together.