"Welcome to Holland..."

I am an Education major, so we often get a lot of poems, spiritual lectures, and motivation and engagement conversations from our professors. I love doing what I do. Children, teaching children, raising children, everythinggggg about children I adore...I have said it once and I will say it again...I look forward to not only having children of my own and raising my children, but helping others by educating them to be the next President, person to find the cure for cancer or common cold, or just simply lending a hand when they need it. I am an Early Childhood Education major, so I don't have a lot to do with Special Needs children, Mid- Level, or Higher Education, but today one of my professors came to class and presented us with a story that touched my heart more than she will ever know. First of all, I give a standing ovation to a Special Education teacher. They are true angels from God and I honestly praise them for a such a wonderful job they do each and everyday. We never think about growing up, marrying our Prince Charming, finding out your pregnant, and then realize your child has some type of complication...Down Syndrome, Cystic Fibrosis, Cerebal Palsy, and the list goes on and on.....How would we react?? How would we handle this??? Would you throw your hands up and say, "I quit!" ? Most of us, including myself, would be a bit scared and I would ask myself many, many questions on whether or not I could raise a child with a complication...We all do it, but you can't look at it as a problem or set-back...You can't.....You keep on swimming, you hold your head high, and you love that child no matter what the situation might be....It's hard, I can only imagine......To sum it all up, a very wise woman had a child that was born with a complication and here's what she wrote...

WELCOME TO HOLLAND


by

Emily Perl Kingsley.
c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. 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 guide books 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 and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and 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. They'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 guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And 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 a while 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. But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And 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, 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 get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.



God Bless, Delta Daisies