I don't know if you all have read this before, but I came acrossed it while finishing up a 10 hour course for my CDA:

Welcome To Holland

"I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience, to understand it, to imagine how it would feel.  It's like this...

When you're going to have a baby, it is like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy.  You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans.  The Coliseum.  The Michelangelo David.  The gondolas in Venice.  You may learn some handy phrases in Italian.  It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arives.  You pack your bags and off you go.  Several hours later the plane lands.  The stewardess comes in and says "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland??" you say.  "What do you mean Holland?  I signed up for Italy."  But there's been a change in the flight plan.  They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine, and disease.  It's just a different place.  So you must go out and buy new guidebooks.  And you must learn a whole new language.  You will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.  It's just a different place.  It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy.  But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills and tulips.  Holland even has Rembrants.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there.  And for the rest of your life you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go.  That's what I planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever go away, because the loss of that dream is very significant loss.

But if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things about Holland."

Emily Perl Kingsley.

I just loved it.
Deborah mom of 4