Celebrating Milestones and Achievements

As many of my network know, my son, Halen, has severe non-verbal autism and encounters many struggles on a day-to-day basis. Our whole family is impacted by his autism and it’s not an easy road… it is especially difficult for Halen.

But…. this week was Halen’s 11th birthday and our office also had a conference to attend so I took the whole family to Florida with me to celebrate his birthday.

Despite hurricane Ian and 2 days without power we managed to get some fun in.

Last time our family visited DisneyWorld was in 2017 (5 years ago) when our son was 5 at the time. On our last visit Halen was not toilet trained and could not sit still for any period of time so we couldn’t take him to a sit down restaurant. He also could not stand still or look at the camera for a photo with the characters at Disney.

Fast forward to this year where he could do all those things 👏 👏. Was the restaurants loud and the waiting in lines for characters super hard for him? Yes…but he did these things anyway… he wanted to participate!!! And this year he was able to point to letters on a communication letter board to tell us that he, too, wanted an autograph book like his sister to get autographs from the Disney characters (poor kid probably wanted this at our last visit but he had no way of communicating it).

While Halen still has many struggles which he is trying to overcome, we celebrate his achievements. These achievements can seem so little to many but, to families like ours, these are huge milestones that we are forever thankful for and celebrate. I lost count of the number of times over the years our typical daughter only had one parent at dinner or an event as the other had to leave with our son who was too overwhelmed.

The point of this post? Don’t lose hope! Our children surprise us and they grow in their own time so be ready to celebrate!!!

Severe autism is not for the faint hearted but please know that our kids are in there and are waiting to shine for us and themselves.