Return to Disney

Nothing is ever simple around here. Life is crazy, but it all somehow works.

Bill and I met early in our freshman year of college and got married a couple of weeks after graduation. At the time, we both had careers in IT - I was a web applications developer, he was a systems administrator. That was ten years, four kids, and a major career shift ago.

Today, I am a freelance author. We have been homeschooling our boys for three years because traditional schooling just wasn't working. Our oldest son spent his entire Kindergarten year being picked on, and it was destroying his spirit. We decided to homeschool for a year, to give him a chance to mature a bit before returning to the classroom, but by the end of that year we realized, "this works." It might not be easy, but it's a whole lot easier than the constant phone calls from the school to come down and handle yet another crisis.

Less than a year ago, two of our boys were diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (I guess that explains why neither of them was able to cope with the social pressure, noise, etc. in the classroom). That launched our family on yet another whirlwind of discovery, learning, and experimenting to find new strategies to cope with life. We took our first trip to Walt Disney World three months after the diagnosis, because we knew that our family needed to get away. Our kids needed to just be kids for a little while. Our whole family had come through so much, we needed some magic, some innocence, before we launched back into school and work and life.

That trip was everything we expected it to be and more. It was an oasis for us, a necessary retreat from the tough realities of life. That's why we can't wait to go back.

As a freelance writer, I am lucky enough to have some control over what I earn. I'll be working a lot in the next few months to make enough extra to take our family back to Walt Disney World. Any tough road is made easier with company, so I hope you'll join me on this journey. Maybe you'll pick up some tips, maybe you'll even decide to join me on this crazy challenge and we can have an ice cream cone together on Main Street in the Magic Kingdom!