My husband and I had a second honeymoon last week.
Okay, so it was less like the first honeymoon and more like a night at a hotel, but it was the antidote to a very long and stressful few weeks for us. We had a brilliant time celebrating our 9th wedding anniversary - we had lunch at the hotel (the same one where we were married and spent our wedding night), spent some time pottering about in the city, saw a comedian as part of an arts festival in our city, had a spa, and woke up to a breakfast that - shock! gasp! - somebody else had cooked for us! It was perfect.
Sitting there at lunch, it was hard not to get into a reflective mood. Not fifty metres away from our lunch table was the courtyard where our wedding ceremony had been held. The room we stayed in nine years ago overlooked the courtyard. Even the staircase outside of our room this time around features in several classic wedding photographs. It was a good day, our wedding. Very simple (only about 60 guests), a dress made by my mother-in-law, a reception we did not go into debt for. And photographs - we’ve all changed so much. My nieces and nephews, then babies and preschoolers, are now in high school or not far from it. Hair was less grey. Girths were less wide (ahem). And my mother was there.
My very favourite photo at our wedding shows DH and I, each holding a son, under the canopy where the vows were said. Because the whole deal was uber-casual, the boys were dressed in tan cargo shorts and matching blue Hawaiian shirts! Jay was 2½ and Boof just 8 months (poor Moo hadn’t been born yet). We’d only just begun to suspect Jay’s development had gone awry, but were - at that stage - concerned with his hearing. The next year would be prove to be one of the biggest trials we’ve since faced. I would fall pregnant within a month of the wedding. We would run through the battery of tests for Jay - EEG, MRI, genetic screening and then finally, two autism assessments. By the end of the year Jay would be in speech therapy and autism playgroup and I would be the heavily-pregnant, stressed out mother of a preschooler and a toddler. Oh, and all this by my 22nd birthday.
Fast forward nine years and oh boy, life has changed!
Jay has developed (after some initial scary years immediately post-diagnosis) into an intelligent, compassionate individual, on par with peers in academics and without some of the common ‘piggyback’ conditions autism-affected individuals can get (no epilepsy, no intellectual disability, no mutism). At nearly 11 ½, he is almost as tall as I am and by the time he hits high school in a little under 2 years from now, he will be well on his way to nearing his father’s height. Dark-blonde and with a friendly, open face, we’ve been blessed.
Boof, at 9 ½, is my Small Old Person. The capacity he has for learning and retaining facts boggles me. After an initial scare when he appeared to be showing the same early autism indicators as Jay did (our first clue was Jay’s lack of speech), Boof hit the ground running. He skipped the first grade (which turned out to be one of the smartest moves we ever made) and now in the fifth grade, currently wants to be a research scientist. The field of study changes daily! He’s was already quiet short for his age before the skip but now the difference is quite stark! His height is a non-issue - he has one of those engaging, inquisitive personalities that endears itself to everyone. A very technical, detail-oriented soul, he requested (and was extremely enthusiastically obliged by Daddy, no big surprise!) a camera for his birthday and instruction on how to use it, and Photoshop. Some Dads take their kids fishing - mine shows his kids how to photoshop Jaws belly-flopping out of the nearest river (fresh water be darned!) Boof is truly Daddy’s ‘mini me’ - the only one of the three kids who has the black hair and brown eyes of both of his parents. I love seeing them work together.
Moo, my angel-girl, is 8. She was in-utero when the planes hit the Twin Towers (the next day, I took a scheduled ‘mum’s day off’ and the collective reaction from everyone, wherever I went during the day, continues to be one of the oddest experiences of my life - it was surreal, even down here in Oz). She was in-utero when Jay had his first autism assessment. She was nursing at every speech playgroup or doctor’s appointment I took Jay to for many, many months. Never able to take an artificial teat - and retrospectively, something I’m quite grateful for - she was my constant companion for many lonely hours when Daddy later changed jobs (the day after we received Jay’s final diagnosis, no less) and had to live away during the week, home weekends, for a 6-month stretch. By the time Miss Moo was old enough to begin speaking, she had the benefit of two speech-therapied big brothers and two over-pronouncing, word-modeling parents. She picked up words with wild abandon and was speaking in full, comprehensive sentences at age 2 - long before the age Jay had said his first word. After two non-typical sons, I was just fine with a regularly-developing pretty little girl to buy dresses for!
Yes, we’ve been blessed. In nine years, we’ve lived a whole lifetime 
