Good evening!! Well, it has been a wonderful day. I am one day closer to my visit with the surgeon on Thursday and surgery will be scheduled then. The day has been one just full of blessings and the last one was a call from Terry Scott, a college student from VFC. Now I am not a vain person but it does this grandma’s heart worlds of good for a handsome college guy to call and pray with her.
Yesterday as I was writing my journal, I heard my friend Curt Beck’s words ringing in my ear. “Brenda never learned how to use a few words” and I realized how long the writing had gotten and saw the time and my session with writing WAS OVER!! So now to more of the story.
We had gotten our answer to our prayers on Matt’s health with his beautiful smile. It didn’t take too long though before he was taking antibiotics for ear infections more days than he wasn’t. Before he was two weeks old, I had him in the emergency room with an ear infection which became our routine until he was ten months old. I would pray and ask God, “What happened to that message of the smile? I thought that meant Matt was okay. My idea of being healthy does not include repeated medicines and doctors visits.” The doctor had told us that because of the way Matt’s ears were formed crying would cause Matt pain. As his mother, my challenge was to keep him a happy baby. Praise the Lord Matt was a happy baby with an extremely high pain tolerance. Fortunately, I was at home with Matt during the day and at that time we lived in a tri-level house, so I had three of everything for him in an effort to keep him comfortable, happy, and NOT CRYING!! Three swings, three walkers and three playpens–you get the picture. I had to have some help in keeping this baby happy. When Kim, now age ten, would come in from school, she’s take Matt Duty. I would go out in the back yard and work on a big pine stump. If I did yard work like sweeping pine straw, I would go at it like putting out a big fire. I never had enough straw to rake!! I mean it takes days for enough to fall to need sweeping again. Thank Heavens Larry brought me home a huge pine stump–pure lighter wood. If it was not raining after school, I would take an ax and work on that stump as if my life depended on chopping splinters for the entire neighborhood. That stump was the best stress reliever that I found. Thirty minutes of that and I could go in and take over as Mom and let Kim do her thing. The problem with my stump activity was that we had some neighbors who were awesome examples of Southern gentlemen. They refused to let me chop on my stump if they knew it. So I had to move the stump where they could not see me and try to chop when they could not hear me. My whacking away on that stump could get noisy. I came up with this therapy on my own and it was wonderfully therapeutic!! I highly recommend this for relieving stress. As an added bonus, you will build up some awesome arm and back muscles!
When Matt was ten months old we went to Birmingham for an ear, nose and throat specialist to check him out. Dr. Sullivan did surgery on his ears the next day. When Dr. S. walked back in the room after surgery, he had the biggest smile on his face when he said, “Your boy is fine. And you have a miracle baby.” He went on to say that since Larry was a builder we would understand that in building a house, you put up the studs before you have anything to hang the sheetrock on. Well, in the formation of a baby’s mouth there is cartilage that has to be formed for the flesh to attach to something. Well, Matt was missing the cartliage. It’s as if God said to the angel putting Matt together, “I know there is no cartliage, but put the flesh there anyway.” He went to to say that Matt was supposed to have been a baby with a full cleft palate that split his lip and nose open but God healed him in the womb. Praise the Lord!! He went on to say that due to Matt’s problems, he’d never be able to sing and I told him that he could play an harmonica!! Now I don’t know where that came from because I cannot remember knowing anybody who played one!! As I had time to consider all the facts, I realized that had Matt not had these nagging ear infections we would never have ended up with a specialist who could tell us about this miracle. It was a true “The Rest of the Story” situation.
Now backing up a little bit, as soon as Matt was born and Larry held him, the dad had fallen totally in love with the new baby. When the orderlies got me into my room where we had some privacy, Larry told me that this had been such a sweet experience that he’d love for us to think about having another baby! Talk about God doing exceedingly and abundantly over what you pray for!
As Matt grew he would not wait for his dad to pick him up like the other two had, he’s just worm his way into Larry’s lap and get between whatever Larry was doing and Larry himself! He could read blueprints at three years of age because as Larry worked on making changes in one, he would explain to Matt what it was that he was doing. They enjoyed each other so much and Matt wanted to be just like his Dad and it seemed at times as if they were attached at the hips.
When Matt talked, it was a challenge to understand what he was saying because he mispronounced everything he said. So early on our family developed a habit of choosing one of the most “Mispronounced” words and repeat it several times for him to hear it correctly. If he asked for a chocolate cookie, we would repeat back to him, “You want a COOK—IEEE? A COOK—IEEE?” I am sure it occurred to him more than once that he had been born into a family of strange folks!! There was a precious friend at church, Sharon Curtis, who worked with children and their speaking problems, and she’d chat with Matt every few months. She’d always say that he was making progress but he’d still have years of formal speech theraphy. So we began to tell Matt how fortunate he was that he was going to have a wonderful teacher who would play games and have fun activities with him. He heard this for at least 2.5 years because he was aware that he didn’t talk like other children. We never had him repeat words after us because it would have just taken too much time because he talked so much (wonder where he got that!!).
Matt was enrolled in Sunday School and at two years he started attending Mother’s Day Out one day a week. I had expressed my concerns to his teachers about Matt’s talking and how I didn’t want other children to make fun of him. With each teacher I got the same response, “Oh, that has never happened!! They try to talk like he does!!” It was apparent as a toddler that Matt was like a magnet pulling others to him with his sweet mellow peace-making personality. He had four teachers that did not know each other that called him “Sunshine” when they would talk to me.
Kindergarden started and Matt loved it. It was apparent that we might have indulged him a time or two because one of the things his teacher wrote on his report card was that “Matt needs to learn to share.” Well, let me tell you that when you know you are living with a miracle, you want to indulge it!! You want to make that miracle happy. So it was just a blessing that he did not STINK from being so spoiled.
The day came that the speech teacher visited the class. When I picked Matt up from school that day, he said “that teacher wouldn’t help me today and I told her that was going to make my Mama mad and she didn’t know what you were like when you got mad.” Well, when I got over the shock of my precious baby telling someone about the horrors of his mother having anger issues, I asked him what teacher this was and what it was she wouldn’t help him with. It was Ms. Gray, the speech teacher and she said she’d call that night. Well, she called and asked me why I thought Matt needed help speaking. My reply was, “Well, I have a question for you. WHY do you think he doesn’t need help because the boy can’t talk plain.” She went on to tell me that Matt only had lazy sounds that would be corrected with time but she would test him again in 3 months and then again in 6 months to see that she was right. AND she was. He never had a formal speech theraphy session. BUT Mom had to explain to him WHY he was not going to have all these games and fun activities in that SPECIAL class I had promised him. OH, PRAISE THE LORD for his abundant mercies and blessings.
Have a wonderful night and I suppose you have figured out that writing is MY THERAPY because when I get up from my chair I feel so revived and blessed to have relived how my precious Lord has walked with me and my family through the years and how He continues to bless us. Have a wonderful sleep. And to you VFC folks, I hope to see you tomorrow night at Firefall.
