When Your Child Needs Community

I've talked at length about Jay and his anxiety in the past. We made a lot of great headway in working through a lot of it, and then we bought our new house, which changed his life, his social circle, and his schedule, which led to a lot of regression. As a parent it's hard because you so desperately want your child to just be able to play and be like everyone else, but they just can't. 

When we moved Kyle developed a stutter, which is common when children go through "life changes", and for a couple weeks we thought we made a lot of headway in moving passed it. He was speaking completely clear again for about a week or so, and then all of a sudden it came back full force, this time accompanied by a facial twitch. So we're back to talking very calmly, very slowly, and showering him with, "I love you" indefinitely until it goes away. The last few days have been better, and we hope we're on an upward trend again, but it's not easy. 

Since Jay isn't in school, and we don't know a lot of people in our neighborhood, Jay's social circle is basically limited to church at this time. The first few weeks we lived here, our entire church was in the process of being reorganized, and then his Sunday School teacher was changing basically every week until they were able to find a permanent one. The limited amount of community that he has, was in complete chaos for the last two months of his life. But today, he had the same teacher at church for the second week in a row, he's had the same classmates for six weeks now, and today, when his face lit up and he ran over to one of his friends and gave them a huge hug, for a moment, it felt like we could all see the light at the end of the tunnel, even if just for a moment.