Answering a friends question

She asked 'what is your new normality?'
I replied 'It is many things'.

Someone asked me the other day how I was coping or managing having a child with special needs and a new baby. I said we were finding our own "new normality" and she asked what is my "new normality"?

It is many things. 

It is experiencing life through different eyes. I am seeing a lot of things for the first time even though this is baby two. I feel as I have been given a gift that I wished for but thought I'd never have. Sometimes I feel this gift might disappear or I wake up and it is a dream. I feel so blessed to have baby 2. 

Before baby 2, I was living and breathing a life with a child with special needs. Of course, we had fun in different ways and we would find joy in that. It was like it defined me - fundraising, appointments, tube feeding, sickness and therapy sessions but it doesn't.  I was letting it define me. I should not have. I'm still who I was before I had kids. Now, I hope, to have grown, changed and found strengths inside me I did not know existed. Now, I am in places I would not have been and made friends I would not have made. I still do all those things but now I have a five month old baby boy who I held not long after he was born and took home with 3 days after he was born. Two worlds have blended together and I could not be happier.  By having a non complicated pregnancy I saw how it should be or perhaps how I wanted it to be, I experienced something new though full of apprehension on the safe arrival of my precious boy. My husband and I are enjoying both children and their steps forward in life.