Jenny shares her family’s story of Thomas’s first eight years. She talks honestly about learning to adapt, adjust and accept life with his diagnosis of Tuberous Sclerosis.

It is an understatement to say that having a child with Additional Needs requires adaptation, adjustment and ultimately acceptance. I cannot speak for other families, but we are still on this journey to true acceptance, and adaptations and adjustments are still being made daily.

From the first day our son Thomas began to have seizures, back in 2004, when he was four months old, adaptations and adjustments were constantly made on a daily basis, as we struggled to cope with these seizures, and deal with an ever-growing round of appointments, tests and specialists.

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Today, we are looking through the round window, or maybe not?

Many of us are mature enough to remember the BBC ‘Play School’ programme for pre-school children which ran from 1964 until 1988. Or maybe you are younger than us and remember ‘Tikkabilla’ which launched in 2002? A popular part of the shows involved looking through a window, round, square or arched, to watch some exciting, real-world happening.

Would we have had a different view, had we looked through a different window? Would we have seen the subject, whatever it was, from another angle? Might the people we saw through the square window have been making something different had we looked through the round window? Did the position from which we looked alter what we saw? Did you prefer ‘round’, ‘square’ or ‘arched’?

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The Acceptance

How many points of acceptance are there as we walk the road with our Additional Needs child? Here Anna shares her thinking on acceptance, following her son’s diagnosis with Asperger Syndrome.

I remember hearing the outcome when the psychologist spoke, on the phone, late one afternoon. I remember thinking that this is a good thing. Now we know. Now we can move forward. That was the first Acceptance.

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