Take a Spin.

**March is Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month. I plan to write and share and probably overshare here this month in an attempt to educate, and even celebrate the ways my family is unique. **

Close your eyes and imagine you just stepped off Alice's Teacup ride in Walt Disney World. Your feet are unsteady. You head is spinning fairly substantially and before you can get your feet firmly planted under you, someone starts throwing hard things at your head. Really really hard things. And if that were not enough, simultaneously someone is reading Alice in Wonderland really loudly over all of this, and periodically asking you if you understand.

You are close to understanding how it feels to have your child -- or for us children -- diagnosed with a long-term disability. (You can read our diagnosis story here.) 

But here's the thing, even when my head was swimming, even when my emotions were rolling down my face,  I knew two things to be utterly and completely true: My boys were exactly the same amazing, lovable, adorable, brilliant little boys after the diagnosis, that they had been before it. The exact same. And the other thing I knew: my job had not changed in the least. I was still to love them, support them, encourage them and fight for them and with them so that they could reach their dreams, so that they could reach their goals, so that they could be everything I knew they could be.

Cerebral Palsy did not then and does not now make them less than. And it didn't make their dreams less than either.

And as their mother, I knew I had to firmly plant my feet. I needed to shake off the whirlwind of emotions. I needed to keep doing exactly what I was doing the day before -- loving them, taking care of them, keeping them healthy. I knew they had already changed me for the better.

I would soon learn just how much.