Welcome to a sneak peek into our completely crazy, over-the-top, scheduled to the last second life. We are the Daniels: Riki, Chuck, Genevieve (13 years old) and Caroline, who we call Charlie (10 years old). Chuck and I have been married for almost 16 years. I’m a stay-at-home mom although that’s a misnomer because I am almost NEVER at home. Chuck works in the oil fields of West Texas. We are Texan through and through so you might find that I tend to throw in some y’alls and “fixin to’s” from time to time.
At 2 ½ years of age, our Charlie was diagnosed with autism. While this diagnosis was a defining moment in who my family would become, it is not autism that defines who we are. It is who we turned to that defines us. What we found while walking the road that autism has taken us down is that we serve a truly amazing God. He has met us exactly where we are at each and every point in our journey. He is there in the moments of grief and comparison that inevitably come when one of your children is measured against other typically functioning children and the world finds them lacking. He is there when the prayers just won’t come because we can’t think of one more way to ask Him to take this cup from our girl. He is there in those moments of joy when Charlie does yet another thing we were told she would never do. He is there when an older sister, though still a baby herself, truly “gets” her younger sister and changes the way her parents see their role. He is there when we realize that without autism in our lives, we would have missed so much of His amazing Grace, and that is something we could not imagine.
We are honored to be a “Good Dirt family”. My hope is in marking our lives by the seasons of the church we will find another layer in our relationship with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And that by sharing this part of our journey with you, we would all realize that our God is bigger than any struggle we might face