The Special Needs Mom Podcast

Building the Summer of Your Dreams

• Kara Ryska

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In this episode, I’m sharing how I’m planning ahead to create a summer that actually works—for me, my family, and especially Levi.

Last summer was rough, so I got intentional about doing things differently this year. I walk you through a six-step process (inspired by my landscape design days!) to create a future you’re excited about—without getting stuck in the “how.”

I cover:

  • What worked, what didn’t, and what’s changing
  • Why support is key (and why I’m hiring help!)
  • How to move forward without overwhelm


Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Kara, host of The Special Needs Mom Podcast:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespecialneedsmompodcast/
Website: https://www.kararyska.com/

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Speaker:

Hi, I am Kara, life coach, wife and mom to four incredible and unique children. It wasn't all that long ago that my son received a diagnosis that had my world come crashing down. I lacked the ability to see past the circumstances, which felt impossible and the dreams I once had for my life and family felt destroyed. Fast forward, past many years of surviving and not at all thriving, and you'll see a mom who trusts that she can handle anything that comes her way and has access to the power and confidence that once felt so lacking. I created the Special Needs Mom podcast to create connection and community with moms who find themselves feeling trapped and with no one who really understands. My intention is to spark the flare of possibility in your own life. And rekindle your ability to dream. This isn't a podcast about your special needs child. This is a podcast about you. If you are a mom who feels anxious, alone or stuck, then you are in the right place. Welcome,

Hello and welcome to the Special Needs Mom podcast. While this episode was intended to be a community huddle episode, but guess what happened? I showed up to the party. I. And nobody else came to play, that might sound sad. Don't be sad for me. It happens. Actually, there was a handful of people that were gonna be there and stuff happens, but I had already kind of thought through the conversation and I got pretty excited about it. So I did a little bit of a pivot and I ended up creating a solo conversation about the topic that I had planned. Now the thing that was on my mind, the thing I proposed to the community to talk about was essentially looking ahead at summer, specifically creating a future that we could get behind, looking ahead and not dread it, and maybe a better way of saying it. I mean, I know it's on my mind. That last summer was, it was really difficult. we were coming right off of a really difficult spring with some medical challenges with Levi, and it led into the summer. We started off pretty strong, but we ended, we ended really. In a tough spot. I ended in a tough spot and if I'm honest, maybe I'm still recovering. And so that's why we're talking about it is that the difficulty of it initiated me doing the very work that we're gonna talk about today last year. Putting things in place so that it could go very, very differently. So I'm gonna break it all down and it'll be a little bit more of a tactical conversation than we have sometimes, but rest assured it'll be fun. We'll have a good time. And as always, as you listen, I want you to be thinking about your own life and how this applies. I also invite you to think about like where you get stuck, where you're like pushing, maybe resisting against what I'm saying or having reasons why it won't work. Those are such good clues to pay attention to. Consider that they're your roadmap to success. So not a problem. I would love to hear'em. So please consider texting or reaching out and letting me know where you're getting stuck or where you're like, Kara, this is bs. Let's talk for reels. And I would say, yes, let's talk. Let's talk through it. I would love to hear it. Okay, so let's see. What are we gonna talk about? We're gonna talk about, I mean, there's so many different ways of saying this and. Essentially we are when, I don't know what I'm gonna name the episode one title I came up with. That sounds corny, but I thought it was kind of funny, is building the future of your dreams. It sounds lofty. I know, I know, but if I'm real honest, I do want you to be dreaming. I do want you to have a future that you say, Kara, heck yeah, I want that. I want that for me. I want that for my baby or my babies. I want that for my husband. I want that for my dog. Like we all want that. We want something that we can look forward to that we're not dreading. So that's really ultimately what this conversation's about. And so I'm going to. Essentially I'm gonna guide you through steps, but before we get there, I wanna give a little bit of a concept of essentially what do I mean by building the future? I mean, exactly that. And the best example I think pulls from my first career. So for. Anybody that has not been around for quite a while,'cause I don't talk about it all that much. My first career was in landscape design and construction, so picture me with a hard hat with plans in my hand with this like I used to have really, I was just thinking about this. I used to have really, really well organized project files and I feel like it's the key to my success. I was very organized. And I was a project manager and so, you know, picture me, I never wore boots, but you know, on the job, in the dirt with the guys, usually the only lady on the scene. So I stuck out like a sore thumb. But I actually really loved it. I loved, what I loved is working with people, hearing what they wanted, what they dreamed of, and literally getting to build it with them. so that building process is what I'm pulling from, and it's a really good thing to keep in mind, right? how do we build the future? First, we come up with a vision, a concept. Even a functionality, right? So if I was building you know, a backyard with somebody, okay, you want a barbecue, you want a fire pit, you want a pool, you want a jacuzzi, you want shade, you don't want any of that. It's all good. What do you want in the future? And this concept is a phase that you have to stay in. Possibility and in dreaming. I mean, we're gonna be purely conceptual.'cause like this doesn't actually apply when you're talking about, like if someone said, I have$20,000 and they wanted all those things, I'd be like, let's live in reality. So. So that maybe isn't the best, best example, but I'm gonna do this kind of lofty example of the building process just because I think it illustrates the concept. Is it perfect? It is not, but we're gonna work with it. So first we start with a concept where we have a vision, where we see something and we say, yes, that's what I want. We dream of something like, how cool would it be if I could go straight from the spa right into the pool? All right. Something like that. Once we get this vision, then we have to start moving it into reality, and typically that's going to start with like, okay, how much would this plan cost? We're gonna move into budgeting, we're gonna look at some cost projections. We're gonna do estimates along the way. Probably even before that, we're gonna do some architectural specifications. We're gonna understand, well, what does it actually take to build that thing? And that, of course, is gonna loop us back into cost estimates. So this whole process goes from concept to construction documents and, essentially understanding what does it take to build this thing. Okay, well now we know what we're building and now we know how we're building and we're gonna move into the future phase and we're actually gonna start building it. Part of that is what I'm gonna call the change order phase, where we recognize, oh, we thought it was gonna work this way, but it turns out it did not. And so we need to make a change. We need to actually do a little bit of a pivot and recognize what we thought would work, did not, and we make a pivot, but. At some point in the future, we will look and we will have a completed building or backyard, or in this case, project in our life. So there's this process of creating something that doesn't exist. That's really what I wanna highlight and where most people get stuck when we're looking at our lives. Is we start too early at looking at how we'll create something and usually, well, almost always, we don't know how. That's the whole point. We don't know how, since we don't know how, what happens right there. I'm saying this with jest, but what happens right there is then dreams die right there. It's almost like they're just, it's like a fire that bursts into like life and flame and fizzles out as quickly as it almost comes to life. So this first phase all of us, I get stuck here too, is to not focus firstly on how intentionally we're going to revisit the how later, but not until we get a crystal clear and compelling vision of the future of the what we want to create. again, this phase, I can't emphasize it enough, is that as soon as that, how creeps in? I want you to consider that's like dumping poison on your dream. And you have to say, get away from me. Poison. Stand back, because my dream is still bursting into life and we don't need to know how just yet because we're gonna figure out how in the future or along the way, I guess we should say. Also, I wanted to, as I go through the process, we're gonna go through, I think I have a six step process. I want you to really be thinking about how and what you want in the future. So if you don't have anything that immediately comes to mind, I specifically time this episode to where it's really good time to start thinking about this like fourth summer. I mean, it was, it was time for me to think about this at the very end of last summer, so a year ago. Well. Nine months ago, but you get it. but I want you to think about the summer because there is certainly time to basically look ahead, dream up a future, and work to fulfill it. Alright, now let's move back into step one. So I think I've made it clear already at how important it is to not get stuck in the how. So this first step. Is the part where we look ahead and we dream. So for me, if I'll use my own life experience as an example, if I look ahead to this summer and I envision, and I'm looking specifically through the lens of Levi and his life and the support that he needs, and then of course how it, commingles with my life. So I look ahead and I want to see Levi engaged. I want to see him, active. Actually it is like I picture him sitting on the couch. That's like his goatee is his spot on the couch where he, it is his comfort spot. It is where he goes. It is his default, but it's not a place where he is energized and full of life. So essentially my vision is not having him there on the couch, that he's up and doing something, or at least at some other point in the house doing something or out of the house doing something. And that makes it possible for the whole family to have schedules and routines that kind of work with that, but they're Not like conflicting with one another. So that's my dream and my vision of the future. And I know it's not crystal clear, it's actually not crystal clear in my own mind, obviously, and that's okay. I know enough. I know about enough of what we need or what I envision and that's compelling for me is to know, okay, I want him busy. I want him engaged. I want him to also go into the summer where he feels confident that it's gonna be a good summer. So that's enough for right now. We don't have to have. All the details because we're just in the future vision portion. Okay. But moving on to step two, this is what I'm gonna call evaluating the Gap. So essentially where are we now? Where are we starting? And essentially what's the gap? What's between what we have and what we will have and what we will build? You can do this a couple different ways. One is you can create a list of all the things that would need to be in place or to happen to have your dream fulfilled. This is a little bit easier if you think about like something less about like designing your experience like in the summertime and like let's just say you decide you want a new house. You might list all of the things that would have to happen to have that dream fulfilled. So this, you can apply whichever one makes the most sense given what future you are building. Now, in my situation, I'm actually gonna pull a lot of my learning. I. From the past to differentiate or to determine what the gap is. And I'm actually gonna do that through a process I call the evaluation process. And it's asking very simple questions and three very specific questions. And the three questions are, and I'm looking specifically at last summer, what worked, what didn't work, and what will I do differently? Or in this case, how do I want it to look different? So if I go back to last summer and I look at what worked, what worked about last summer, I would say one thing that worked majorly was having signed up for an oncology camp where Levi went away on his own for six days. that was instrumental because it taught me how to prepare other people to care for him for six days. And it took a lot of trust. It took a lot of trust, and this particular group that cared for him, nailed it. They're amazing and we are thrilled to be sending him back again this year. So, a shout out to oncology and kids here in San Diego. I know most of you, don't share the cancer experience, but if you do have, a child or know a child who that is their story or a sibling, I cannot recommend them enough. Okay, so that is something that majorly worked. A second thing that worked is that we went to Idaho for our family vacations. We drove out there, we went to see our very own Alex, who also happens to be the editor of this podcast and a dear family friend and, previous nanny to our family. So. We had a blast out there. We gotta stay with her and her husband and her dogs, and it was really fun and adventurous and relaxing, and man, it stays light late in Idaho in the summer. So we went to bed like so late every night. So I slept in like late every day. Thank you very much. Okay, so that worked. now you might notice that the list of what worked is pretty short, so we're gonna move on to what didn't work and. Oh, so many things. The one that makes me laugh the most was. Me signing Levi up for a class through like the parks and rec of our own city parks and rec department, a class that he was interested in, that was not designed for children with disabilities. And I did some due diligence, as in I talked to them ahead of time. I talked to the instructor, I explained his disabilities and, and, let's just say that. We did not finish the week class and we did have a conversation about how insurance would cover the damage on this particular historic building that happened. That was a rough, honestly, that was a rough conversation. I was so disheartened and I'm laughing about it now'cause I can. I could look back and be like, that was funny, but it actually was really hard at the time that I had really tried to set up something where he could have some independence, where I could have some independence, and it did not work, and it was really discouraging. So that didn't work. Now, other things that did not work is having unplanned downtime for Levi. What that means is. Having no plan that did not work for me or for Levi also did not work, is for me, the pull of being primary caregiver and my professional life, so I didn't have as good of a structure. As I did in previous summers for how this would go, and that just, it didn't work. It kind of made me pulled in a couple different directions and I ended up just feeling stressed and, what's it called when you're pulled in two different directions? Pulled, I felt stressed and pulled. Kind of connected to that. What else didn't work is not having a backup, right? So it was just me, myself and I, my husband was at work, for a lot of the summer. My oldest son, who is, was 1617 last summer. He turns his birthday's in August, so he turns the next year older. He's turning 18 this year. I can't believe it. He was gone a lot of the summer, so he is very, very supportive to our family. He does a lot in terms of, being an active participant in, meeting Levi's needs. And so that was noted. I was the only one. Okay. And last one is, maybe I kind of said it before, but like just not having. Enough or really anything for Levi to do or to be connected to. So it just was so glaringly apparent, and in ways that is hard on so many levels. moving on to the last question of the evaluation is what will I do differently? This is actually a question where I'm, yes, I'm doing a, evaluation, but it kind of cues me up for the next step. So what will I do differently? plan much further in advance. So that's why we're having this conversation now. As I mentioned earlier, I really started in terms of creating the structures that I needed, for more support. I started like last August, right when he went back to school. I said, we can't do that again. We're starting now. And, it's really cool to see things actually falling into place. So other things I will do differently, or I am doing differently is develop a much wider support team. So no longer will it be me, myself and I, it will be we, there will be other people, other adults, other capable adults. That are able to support him and foster his own independence. This is an interesting one. One of the things, as I did this evaluation that I put in here. Is what will I do differently is accept that he needs one-on-one support most of the day. Unless he's having like chill TV time. So he, he can obviously watch TV on his own. I shouldn't say obvious. It's not obvious for everybody, but he can sit on his phone and entertaining himself with puzzles and probably buy things he's not supposed to buy so he can do that. He can do all of those things and he doesn't need one-on-one support for that. But then I would have to accept that that will be all he's doing. So he needs one-on-one support to do really anything beyond that. so accepting that actually, I think is really, really critical.'cause I think it's something I have to kind of accept over and over again. And, what else is on this list? I said I will be more generous with myself in terms of time off work, so I still haven't fully decided. I'm, I'm pretty close, but, so my husband's a school administrator, so he's an assistant principal, and so he gets three and a half weeks off in the summer, which is spectacular, but it's like the three and a half weeks that is the most. Unhelpful to have him off. I mean, it's great. I'm not complaining, but end of July, August is really the challenging time because all of my kids are fully available and wanting, you know, all the things that kids want and my husband's at work. So that's where I'm really looking at. Okay. Like it, so it doesn't really work for me to like pretend like, Business is as usual when it's not like when I'm actually full-time caregiver because of the needs of my children. It's really gonna have me look at how do I wanna structure my work, my professional life, so that. I'm not putting myself in a position where it just is like not fun for anybody. And I wanna mention, I have the flexibility'cause I work for myself and the financial ability to do that. And I know that some of you may not be in that situation. So for you, your list may look very different. But this is also, I wanna go back to. Not getting stuck in the how so I still dunno how, let's put it that way. I don't know exactly how I'm going to manage to like keeping my career going and being more generous with time off work, but I'm putting it out there so that I can start to figure it out. What would this look like? What could this look like? What does it look like to both. Support myself and support my kids. So that's what I wanted to point out here. So I will figure that out. other thing, and this is a big one, what will I do differently? I will have hired help for transportation and supervision. So I guess this is the same thing as. Develop a wider support team. This is what it looks like actually having somebody that can drive and that can supervise and that's trained to supervise. Levi and I, I say supervise related support. Levi, coach him and I will have a plan that I feel confident in. So I knew going into last summer that it was a little weak in terms of my plan, and so this summer I am committed. To going in feeling like we've got a great plan. I wanna go in feeling excited about it, for all the opportunities that we will have. Okay, so that's a quick evaluation. I'm pretty sure I actually did an episode on doing an evaluation, so if I do remember correctly on that, we'll link to the episode. If you wanna geek out on that a little bit with me. But let's move on to what I am calling step three. So we have step one, we have the future vision that we have built. We have step two, which is determining the gap. So all the things that basically we will do differently that we are creating to have our dream fulfilled. And this step is looking at all that and deciding the next step. Now, if you saw my notes, you would see that the word next is capitalized. Why? Because I did not say, decide all the steps. I said, just the next step. This is where most of us shift into overwhelm. We look at all that and we're like, oh, that's too much and I'm out. That is more overwhelming than just suffering through the summer. Hopefully I'm being a little dramatic, but I get it. It can get overwhelming pretty quickly.'cause guess what? My guess is you're not doing this like on a retreat island, like you're doing this while you're juggling all the regular things of life, and it's already a lot. I know that. I feel that. So deciding the next step is designed to keep you. Moving forward, but not overwhelmed. It's also very helpful to decide the next step. So like, if I look at all of these things that I'm saying I'm going to do differently, the most critical piece is hiring that person. That's my decision. That is the, the step that I'm going to be focused on and take action in. And so when I say hire the next person, okay, what's, the next step? Okay. The next step for me in that is to, well, was to, I, I just did this actually this last weekend, was to write a job description. I had to actually dust off my hiring skills and actually I'm thinking about doing an episode about this. I thought it would be kind of interesting. But I had to dust off my own process and wrote a job description. I, yes, used AI two. Help me write a job description. So I just muttered in my non grammatically correct, like, basically like this is what I want the person to be able to do. I want them to drive this and that. I want them, you know, to be able to coach him and, all the things that I need this person to do. And they wrote a beautiful job description for me. And I posted that. I posted it on care.com. So that's where I was getting a little bit stuck on where to find the person. My hairdresser said, you know, we found a great tutor on care.com and I said, tutor, maybe I should consider going here. So to summarize, my own next step is to hire the person. And now that you can tell has many different steps with within it. So I'm constantly, in a dance, we'll call it, of deciding the next step and taking action. So actually step four is take action, and jumping ahead to step six is basically do step three and four over and over again. And so I have done that. And so it can be very, very helpful to look at what you have to do and. Isolating the singular, most impactful or time sensitive action item and just asking yourself to do that. Now, step five is kind of a, maybe it's like a four A, maybe it's instead of step five, it's step four A. It's predicting where you might get stuck now. I actually have an episode coming out that's going to address this in a much higher detail, but in that episode I'm talking about getting support or having structures that are sufficient to your resistance in other ways, helping yourself where you need help, getting the help that you need to do the things that you want to do. And so a lot of times we can actually look at ourself. And recognize where we usually get tripped up again, predicting where we might get stuck. Now if I look My own summer project where I can predict that I'm gonna get stuck is hiring this person. Why? It feels complicated. There's a lot of moving parts. It feels hard. It feels tricky. I feel like how do I find this perfect person? Or how do I even know that they're going to keep Levi safe? All of these questions, there's a lot of questions, so. It'd be very, very predictable to do a little spinning out and a little non-moving forward in this stage. And so this is where what I have learned to do, and I am hoping that I'm gonna support you in learning to do, is to support yourself at a higher level. So that looks like for me, what I'm doing in this. Situation is I'm going to be meeting with, somebody called an independent facilitator that I'm going to use to help me through the process. So I'm gonna use this person who has more experience than I do, and I'm going to use this person to ask questions and to give advice for where I feel like I'm stuck. So that part is very, very important to recognize that. There are some challenging parts to fulfilling on this dream that we have ahead of us. And so not pretending like they're not there, but rather really looking at them, acknowledging them, and. Finding ways to meet yourself where you need to be met. So like I mentioned before, step six is decide the next step and take action over and over again. I. So this is where you, you know, in an ideal situation, I would've told you to like, write out your future vision. Maybe even make a really cool like vision board. There's a million different ways to do this. But you really actually have something that you can visualize, like with your actual, mind, I was gonna say eyeballs, but it's actually your mind. It's not your eyeballs. So something that you can actually envision. And that you can see so that when you check in and say, okay, well what's the next, you're able to break it down piece by piece to do the thing. One of the pictures that I wanted to share with you are the, I guess, visuals is that I, I sit down in, at my desk, so actually that's where I record as well. So I'm there right now. Many times when I feel, gosh, there's just so many things to do. I sometimes even have a hard time deciding what the most important thing is. I literally picture myself. I was never a football player, so I don't know why this is the picture, but there's, you know, if you could like picture like football players at football practice and they have those like dummy thingies that like they all run against and like push and they kind of keep their legs moving. And sure enough, like it finally budges. So I picture myself, not so much ramming into the thing, but I picture myself just like moving my feet. Just keep moving. Even if it's something that maybe it's not that important that I do, just to move on something so that, sure enough. Eventually the big things budge. I like that picture. And I think for me it's, you know, it, it shouts to like progress made because, recognizing that sometimes it's just, you know, just allowing ourselves to be where we're at is fine. Right? The, the whole point is not to not do this perfectly. The whole point is to be moving to words where you want to go, said in another way to have the experience in life that you want to have. And I would say most of you want to have more joy, more peace, more rest, more fun. And so that's where we're. Declaring we are going. That's the building that we are building. All right, so while this wasn't a huddle episode like I planned, it was fun for me because I got to think about being with you all and I really like that and I hope you're leaving feeling more hopeful. That you have some access points to do your own version of the football singing and to move towards where you want to be. And if you feel stuck still, oh, no problem. I am here for you. We are here for you. So actually there is a community. Inside the Pathway to Peace coaching community, and this is the work that we get to do together. So I think it's safe to say, you all know I am a big fan of not doing this alone. Together is the only way. And so I really want you to consider if it's not in Pathway to Peace, where is the community? Where are you gonna be doing this work together? I want you to just make sure you have something. That's what I implore of each of you. Okay. Well, I think I was pretty excited about that and maybe I talked too fast, and so you'll forgive me. I hope, I think you will. If you have any questions, if you have any feedback, please use the text, the show feature. I'd love to hear from you. It's so, honestly, it's so encouraging. I, I don't get very many texts from y'all. But when I do, I feel real excited about it. So thank you for those of you who take a second to tell me what the episodes are, meaning to you, what is helping you, and what you want more of. All right? And with that, with lots of care. I will see you on the next episode.