I honestly never thought there would be a day that this blog wouldn’t be the only blog I’d ever want and need.  I’ve always poured my heart and our life and days into it along with my business.  I’ve never regretted that, not once.  I am who I am and I’ve been blessed immensely by blogging.  I’ve met wonderful people, made lifelong friends, laughed, cried, documented, shared, and carved out my little space of the web for the sake of my children, my husband and myself.  Why?  So that we can remember.

And then Teagan got sick.  And our days were painful and long and we were in crisis mode.  And I couldn’t blog about it.  I hated that I couldn’t, but I couldn’t.  I refused to share him then, I wanted to protect him.  I wanted to protect myself from saying he was doing a little better only to have to explain it and say he wasn’t again.  It was a matter of self preservation.  After almost 4 months, we are finally able to breath again.  We’ve thought a lot about what we would share or even if we would, how to share it, what to say, the legal aspects we needed to consider.  And it came down to this:  our son was saved by a blog reader.  Her name is Marti and she not only set us on a path to healing, she traveled that journey with us.  She held our hands, she helped heal him.  She made him physically stronger than he’s ever been, she’s an OT and worked with him for months.  Many times late at night, trying to find a way to squeeze in one more OT session, one more hour with him because just maybe it would help.  But she didn’t stop there, she hunted with us for the right doctors, she showed up to appointments to stomp her feet along side with us, she helped us with supplements and natural healing, I like to call her his personal advocate.  Her husband calls her the bulldog because she doesn’t give up.  Thank God for that.  Without her, without blogging, we’d be in a dark place. How do you thank someone for saving your child?  Saying it certainly isn’t enough.  We do say it.  A lot.  But what else can we do?  We pay it forward and use our voice.

Jason and I put a lot of thought into how to share and what to share.  We have decided to start another blog and blog together.  Whoa, I know right, blogging with my husband, it makes me a little nervous and excited to drag him into the blogging world because it’s always been *my* thing around here.  But he’s totally into it and I can’t wait.  It may not make a lot of sense as to why we need another blog and why we can’t just tell the story of what happened here and then move on and go back to our normal lives.  Or why we even need to tell the story at all.  And that’s the thing, we have a new normal, our lives are forever changed in many ways.  We have already written about what happened to him and his diagnosis.  We’ve been thrust, somewhat unwillingly, into drastic changes in finding a healthier, less toxic, way of life from everything to the food we eat, how we cook it, supplements we take, how we clean our home, reducing environmental toxins around us like VOC’s and pesticides.  It is overwhelming every single day.  But we are making improvements, we are tackling them one by one.  Again, why not just do that here?  Because there are other moms and dads out there who are going through what we went through with Teagan.  They are desperately searching for answers, yet nothing fits.  They are googling symptoms and nothing fits.  I don’t want that lost here in stories of how Taryn fell asleep in a shopping cart, a 10 on Tuesday and the latest cutie I’ve photographed.  It needs a home of its own.  Will Teagan’s old pediatricians read it?  Yes, I’m sure they will.  I hope they do.  I hope they read every last word and visualize what Teagan went through.  While we do not write specifically about them and what they did, they know his history.  I hope they take it and educate themselves on what they missed so it never happens to another child in their practice again.  I hope they look themselves in the mirror and know they had a hand in his suffering and I hope they ask God for forgiveness for the mistakes they made over the last 2.5 years to enable them to experience personal and professional growth.  Will we be judged by others, family, friends, clients, for our choices?  Sure.  Will people decide not to hire me as their photographer because we combine natural and traditional medicine choices into our lives?  I don’t know, maybe, probably.  I’m ok with that, I am who I am and I won’t apologize for that.  I earned this place where I’m standing right now and I’m proud of it, it wasn’t an easy road to get to.  Will people judge us that we can no longer vaccinate Teagan?  I’m sure of it.  Those things are bound to happen.  They hurt, we’ve experienced it already, but this is where we are, this is the path God has chosen for us.  I’ve asked God many times over the last four months, what do you want us to do with this?

This is where we landed, Jason and I blogging together, coming out from the other side of healing our son, finding our new normal.