Just in case

I am sure that as parents of a special needs child, you have asked yourself the what if questions many times. What if I am in a car accident? What if I get sick and can't take care of my son (daughter)? What if I'm in a plane crash?

Should I keep going? No, I don't think I need to. I am sure you get my drift. If you are like me, and I am sure some of you are, you quickly dismiss the "what if" questions and go about your day, pushing those negative thoughts deep into the recesses of your brain where no one except the dream fairies can find it.

And oh those dream fairies. They sure like to get into your inner most thoughts, don't they? They like to find all your deeply hidden anxieties and make a whole lotta problems for you while you sleep. Ever have the dream where you can't find your child? You look and look, but can't find him (her)? I hate that one. It appears once every month or so. As if we don't have enough anxieties while we are awake?

The truth is, we really can get rid of those nasty dreams as well as the ogre disguised as a fairy. All we have to do is face our fears in real life. We have to look at reality and recognize that our "what if" questions are not that far fetched. They are actually possible if not inevitable.

If you have started to fill out the LifeCare book templates, then you are at the beginning of planning for the day when someone else will take over the responsibility of parenting your special needs child. Good for you. Print those pages out and put it into a binder with dividers, and you have the beginning stages of the manual called How To Take Care of My Child. It's a great first step.

I have one more idea for you. This might be fun. In addition to the templates, you should write a narrative about your child. It should be a story all about your child starting with what time he or she wakes up and exactly what happens after that. Blow by blow all the way until they fall asleep. You should pretend that you are explaining to someone what your child does every single day. In the story, you will want to include all the special things that you do for your child, all their reactions, every quirk or response to stimuli that you can think of.

Before you write the story, write an outline. List each area that you want to talk about-almost like you are writing a term paper. This way, you won't leave out any of the important details.

You can include photos in your story, too. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say. Maybe you are writing about a particular toy that your child must have with them at all times. You could put a photo of the picture so that if someone were to need to get that toy for your child, they could easily locate it. You could also embed videos. What a great way to demonstrate how you brush your child's teeth or in my case, how I prompt Blake when we are in the kitchen making our weekly quiche. Though the videos won't be in the print version of the book, you can reference them to the file on your computer.

There are many ways to approach this task. You can make it a fun activity or a sad one. You can look forward to writing it all down or you can cry your entire way through it. If you absolutely hate to write, there are good programs or apps so that you can dictate the whole thing. Dragon Dictation is one of the more common programs around designed to accomplish this. I don't do well with dictation. I am much more descriptive when I type, but some people are the opposite, and the dictation programs are effective for them.

Lastly, when you write, pretend that you are telling the story of your child to someone who is sitting next to you. Imagine you are being interviewed by a talk show host rather than looking at this as a document that may be used in the event something happens to you. This is a living document. It is dynamic in nature meaning that it will change with time. Today your child obsesses on his iPad. Next year, it could be something else. Our children change with time just as we do. We know them. We understand them. It is our job to try and teach others to know them as well. Just in case.