June 18, 2014 – Got Meghan's Blog

My nana is obsessed with the beach. Pretty much anything that has to deal with sand, palm trees, and seashells. She’ll love you til kingdom come if you are even a little addicted to it too. Growing up, she had all of these little lighthouse knick knacks around the house. She’s always had some sort of beach like, sunny atmosphere in that house. Over the years I think the love of the warm weather and beautiful scenery kind of grew even bigger than it originally was, I mean the midwest doesn’t have the (usually) hot summers of 100 degrees or so and all we have are cornfields and normal oak trees growing everywhere. Nothing really unusually here and I think she has always brought her memories into everything she does. If you were to go into the bathroom you’d seriously think you were at a hotel on the West Coast because it is literally covered with palm trees and seashells. Now she’s got this little project that we worked on yesterday. I’m still a little confused on where it’ll be placed but it seems to fit in the theme perfectly and it also lets me bring out my creative/artistic side to the project as well.

Yesterday we did this thing of getting different sizes and shapes of seashells she’s had for years at a time. We’re gluing them onto this plastic board or whatever. It’s definitely plastic and thank god because of all that happened between the both of our wheelchairs, boxes, and my papaw getting up and down from his chair about five times we were surprised nothing broke on it. I started with the three big shells you see on the picture above, I thought it was best to get an idea of how everything would look like before we even glued anything on. The three big ones there were already glued to their place but those smaller ones were never glued on in that same place. I even had to move the board forward so you could actually see the seashells instead of the boxes we places underneath so it wouldn’t be that difficult for me to place them on the board. I’m glad to say we only dropped one on the floor and nana burned only burned her fingers twice. Two factors that can be pretty tricky when you do big projects like these are nothing is made for ones who have troubles with their fingers and use their toes to hold on to something. We found a though and I think how they look now is pretty cool! The next I go over there we’re going to be adding flowers and some old sand too. So stay tuned for the second installment of this post!

When you have a child that has any kind of disability, you instantly try to make things easier for them as possible. Sometimes people go a little too far with this, almost to the point where they don’t have much of a choice in things that happens in their life. I have been a fairly independent person. Even as a kid, I would literally scoot on my butt as fast as I could go to catch up with the others. I would do everything in my power to be like everybody else. This is why I was the one who figured out that I could feed myself. According to my mom, she had given me my plate and sat it on the floor by me with a fork ready for her, but she said she had turned away for a minute to grab something and found me with a fork in one foot and a piece of hot dog in my mouth. I’d say that’s impressive and that talent only grew to more things for me to master. Writing, drawing, grabbing, texting, typing and driving my wheelchair around. As the years grew on, I started learning more and more to the point where there was no end in sight.

If you’ve been reading my posts from a year ago, you know that I don’t understand why people think I’m inspiration. I never have. It’s not that I don’t think I’m special but I know everybody sees me doing everything with my feet and sees the disability first, that’s who they define me as. A handicapped person. I just have never felt like one, even when I was around other kids with disabilities. I know that’s kind of mean to say but I was mainly around kids who were able-bodied and just saw myself apart of them. In my middle school days, I realized how uncomfortable I was in my own skin. The other girls could wear flip-flops and high heels. I couldn’t wear my sneakers longer than ten minutes before I’d fling them over to the other side of the room. I hated shoes. I just mainly envied the popular girls by the fact that they could do sports and had the cute boyfriends. Nobody wanted me and I didn’t understand that. I think after graduating not only did I finally see not one, but many lights.

I was too into impressing people.
I am a handicapped person, whether I like it or not.
Unless things are set in stone, don’t expect anything.
Nobody stays longer than they’re needed to.

I’m happy to say that after four years I have realized all four of these things. I wish I could go back in time to see my younger self in middle school crying herself to sleep in the middle of the night and tell her that she’ll understand why she’s feeling these things and she’ll grow to love herself. I do love myself but I still don’t see myself as an inspiration. I feel like I never will honestly. The more I learn to do with my toes the more attention I tend to draw to myself. Some of it is good don’t get me wrong, I say all this but it doesn’t mean I’m not proud of myself for learning ways to potentially help me in the future if I was ever to move out of the house one day. My nana has been teaching me different things lately, some of these things I’ve actually never done before and I’ve ended up surprising the heck out of myself. One of these things I had to do today about five times. My nana gets meals from these people and they bring them in boxes. I usually help her sort and she does the boxes. Well, after watching her and she showing me how to do it, I finally figured out how to get both of my feet and legs to mind long enough and close the boxes. By the last two, I was a pro!

The other one, we do everytime I go over there. Unless it’s my dad taking me over there then he is the one that gets my drink for me. We haven’t been doing the new way for that long but I have been talking about it a lot because I have never been able to open up a pop can before. My grandparents are having trouble with the tips of their fingers and I remember one day asking if I could try to open the can because I think something was injured. She had this neat little screw that just hooks on and it’s got two sides, so in a way makes easy but yet difficult when you’re in a rush because you have to turn it around! Well, we’ve done this about seven or eight times now and I’m happy to say it only took me probably four minutes to get it open today. However, we did have to stop a couple of times because my nana was doing other things in the meantime. So it took me about four minutes to get it turned around and open it. Plus, I wanted to get some proof for you all and even though my feet are not in these pictures they are there making sure the stinking chair doesn’t move the can back and onto the floor. It was bad enough that my nana had gotten two separate straws because she kept sticking them in her drink. Thank god it was just water and not her hot tea. We didn’t want to lose the can either. That wouldn’t been pleasant!