Traveling This Week
Hi everyone! I hope you all are doing well and had a great week! This week we travelled to see my Nana, and I just wanted to talk about how it went and the challenges we overcame.
Traveling with my family is definitely an experience, there is a lot of planning and packing, but we have gotten pretty good at it. We had to pick this week to go to my Nana's almost a month before because we have to look at all of our schedules, Cate's appointments, and prior commitments, but luckily we were able to pick a week and just commit to it before we planned anything else. Cate just started a day program about 2 weeks ago, which is so great, so we also had to acknowledge that more recently, but decided to still come up. The next challenge we have to deal with is packing. Cate needs soooooo much stuff. We have to bring basically her entire wardrobe because she goes through a lot of clothes in a day, changing supplies, feeding supplies, medication, and her toys and iPad. It is an ongoing joke within our family that even if we are just going on an overnight trip (let alone a week), it looks like we are moving out of our house. Cate's things take up about half of our car. My mom is very good at getting all of Cate's things together and she has a mental checklist of everything we need, and my dad is the master car packer because he finds a way to fit everything. It took a lot of logistics, but you know we did it.
The next challenge we had to face was actually leaving our house. Covid-19 definitely played a big factor in some anxiety to go to a different place, but also the fact that Cate hates leaving home. Because of Covid-19 and Cate's anger in the car, she has not gone anywhere in a whole and it is always nerve racking to see how she will react being in a new environment. As I have said, Cate does not like the car at all, but we have medication for long rides that relaxes her and prevents entire ride screaming fits, yay! The ride went very well and out of the multiple hour ride, she only yelled for about 20 minutes, which is a huge deal. She has been super happy up here, so that is a huge plus too.
The final challenge we had to face this week was school and work. I am in my junior year of high school, and I am completely online until November, so I am working remotely. My dad is also working remotely and has been crazy busy, and on top of everything my mom is working from home too (she only works from home, so this was nothing new). I am doing live Zoom classes from 7-3 and then about 2-4 hours of homework a night, so it was really hard for me to move out of my home office to a new place. I was really nervous to leave because I finally had adjusted to my home space, but then had to adjust to a new place for a week, but again we figured it out. My dad and mom also had to adjust, but they did it too.
Even though traveling was really daunting this week, we figured it out like we always do. We take what we do in stride, and it almost always works out. I am really glad we got up here to be with my Nana. We love you Nana!
I hope you all have a great weekend and week ahead. Thanks for reading!
--Alex