Our Life Map

Recently, this post has been getting a lot of press in the special needs community. A mom decided to put into a picture what she could not put into words - the complexity that is involved in taking care of a child with special needs. Then another blogger I follow did her own sketch and I became even more interested in what the map entailed, being more familiar with that family's situation.

I looked at both of their drawings and while there were a lot of similarities, there were some differences. I thought it was a really great idea and so I sketched ours out very quickly, mostly to show Jordan and to see on paper what our life really looks like.

Upon seeing it, we were both pretty amazed. "Too bad no one could ever read that, or you could put it on the blog", said Jordan.

Ahem, yes, I do have a bit of chicken scratch. I should have been a doctor just so I could write annoyingly bad prescriptions all day. I tried to pretty it up by quickly scribbling Rio's pencil crayons on each section to separate them, but apparently it was still a no go. Too messy.

Jordan then suggested that I make the diagram properly, like in a document. At first I laughed, but then I made it my own personal challenge. My Project Manager anal-retentiveness (and skills) came into good use and I whipped off that bad boy like there was a deadline at stake (the nerd in me says 'oh microsoft visio how I miss you - I had to do this in word!').

I am pretty impressed with the results, so decided I would share it with all of you. Enough patting myself on the back for my stellar work - here you go:

(click on it to make it bigger if you care to see the details)

Now that I have given you the history of how this pretty little number ended up on the blog, I should probably speak to the content...

First off let me say that any family could make a map of their lives like this and it would be pretty big. If you have kids and jobs and hobbies, well, you could take up most of page. In fact, I didn't do enough justice to the "normal life" sections of this because I just didn't have the room. I did want to make an accurate picture of the whole family, however, so I included as much as I could for all of us, not just the boys and all of their extras. Hence why I'm calling it our "life map". 

Some of the sections are fairly straight forward, with only the odd "special" addition. But what first shocked me was the financial section. Without the boys having CP, the only part of that chain that would have existed would be RESP (education savings plans for all three kids) and household. Otherwise all of the rest is directly associated with a disability. 

And then of course there's the health section. That, as expected, is huge. A lot of families might have GP, dentist, optometrist, and a few specialists, and that would be more or less it. You can see that is a tiny little fraction of ours, and what stems from "boys" is immense. 

After making this map, I no longer feel any guilt saying I'm busy, because holy heck is that ever true! For every additional piece of this map, there are not only endless appointments, but tons of paperwork, and a ridiculous amount of scheduling*. 

Back in the day when I was making flow charts and org charts and all sorts of other charts that looked like this, did I ever think I would be making one this complex to describe my own life?! Ha, no! However, I can say that if I was a good (I hope) at this kind of thing in my career, I'm an even better at it when it comes to real life. 

*Yes, I listed scheduling under my work. It's true, it is a HUGE part of my day. With the number of appointments we attend I am constantly juggling and organizing. I should have added budgeting too! Once again, thankful that I used to do this for a living.

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UPDATE: Check out all the other parents that had the same idea as me!