A recipe for a crazy but fun summer vacation.
Ingredients
One crazy independent toddler
One amazing and strong kid with Rett,
One busy, multitasking and exhausted dad
One overwhelmed but happy mom
Directions
Knead all ingredients together. Add in a dollop of seizures, a dash of minor accidents to taste. Layer in flights to two different states to visit two different families, and you’ve got yourself a Tesler family summer vacation.
Add sea salt as needed.
Two weeks of travel and I am tired. Let me start by saying, coordinating all of our schedules on both sides of our family and our schedules isn’t an easy task. It took weeks/months to figure out the dates and details and the craziest part is we almost didn’t get to go.
Here is what happened. The week before we were going to be leaving for NY to visit AJ’s family. Mags started having more seizures. It was really inexplicable day to day. Then the day before we were to leave, Mags had a surplus of seizures – five in a day. The neurologist suggested putting her on Valium as a rescue medication, but our local pharmacies couldn’t get us the prescription in time since we were leaving the very next day. I had to cancel the rest of my day and head over to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, because that was the only place I could get the medicine if we were going to make our flight. Then when AJ got home from work we had to discuss “Should we go?”. If we thought her life was at risk we would never get on the plane. We have this discussion more than I would like to admit. But, ultimately, we decided that sitting in a seat on a plane, buckled in, with easy access to rescue medication was no more dangerous than her being anywhere else, so kept moving forward to leave in the morning. We had the new meds, the emergency meds and her regular seizure medication. On the way to the airport, she had a seizure that was longer than they had been. Once we knew she was okay, we discussed. “What should we do?” again. We both knew if she had a seizure in flight, we were prepared. So we got on the plane to NY. As stressful as it was deciding to go, I am so happy that we did.
We swam, we ate, we played on the beach, we ate, we played with cousins, we ate and we were loved by our family. At least Magnolia was loved by the family, the rest of us are quite obnoxious and no one wants to claim us. The medicine had made Maggie pretty emotional. And even worse was her coming off the medicine. She cried the first day or two and we couldn’t figure out what it was. By the time we had, the medicine was out of her system and she was back to her typical self, bouncing around the beach, splashing her brother and mom . and delighting her grandparents.
Part one of summer vacation in Atlantic Beach,NY was a success. It’s a calm, relaxing place and we love being there with family. Traveling is tough but its almost always worth it. Next up Part 2 Summer vacation the Texas family. Here we go…
So happy for you all to enjoy the beach and family. You are amazing parents!