“I can’t believe we just did that.”

That’s the phrase I’ve said at least a dozen times since we lifted Isaiah from his wheelchair and laid him back onto his bed in Amarillo. The Make-A-Wish trip to Florida was simultaneously one of the hardest and best things we’ve ever done.

Overall, we are thankful. Thankful that we did it. Thankful that we were able to do it. Thankful for Make-A-Wish. Thankful for our nurse. Thankful for our parents. Thankful for my aunt and uncle. Thankful for our family. Thankful for our friends. Thankful for everything.

We loved traveling with our family again…and all that traveling entailed. Of course, the big experiences were wonderful—experiences like watching dolphin and sea lion shows at Gulfarium and learning how to build professional-grade sand castles. For me though, it was the little things that were the best. We ate at restaurants together as a family. We went to stores together as a family. We haven’t done that in 2 and a half years. We sat around a beach or a pool, ate way too much food, and laughed a lot.

Isaiah handled the trip very well. One of our biggest fears leading up to the trip was Isaiah’s bones. Not only would the trip require Isaiah to be upright in a chair or wheelchair longer than usual and on a more bumpy ride than usual, but there would be a lot of transitions from bed to wheelchair to car and plane. Careese has been working for months to prepare Isaiah’s body for the trip. (For the record, I’ve helped, too…but she has been the driving force behind doctors’ visits, therapies, and his daily regimen of stretches and exercises.) We felt confident he could handle the trip. He is the strongest kid we’ve ever known; but we were still very worried that something might go wrong during a transition. (I can’t describe how nerve-racking it is to try to transfer a kid who can’t hold his own weight and who often begins a seizure mid-transition.)

All that said, Isaiah handled all the movement very well. He didn’t have any more seizures on the trip than he usually does at home.

I could go on and on about the trip…I probably will in later posts. But, here’s the thing Make-A-Wish did for us that we will never be able to repay: we sat with our wonderful boy on a beautiful beach. We fulfilled a promise we made to him years ago, a promise that has hung over our heads ever since. We held him in the water and helped him feel the waves. If for only a little while, our boy wasn’t relegated to a hospital bed or wheelchair…or stuck sitting in a room amidst of hoard of medical stuff: the concentrator, humidifier, pulse ox monitor, feed pump, pads, gaus, meds, meds, and more meds. He was outside. He was in the sun. He was in the wind. He was in the waves. He was floating with his momma and daddy.

The experience was something you can’t really understand unless you’re a parent. If you are a parent, you can imagine what it meant to us to be able to have that experience with our boy…to have that experience with his brothers, sisters, and grandparents, too. Was it easy? Of course not. It was one the hardest things—both physically and emotionally—we’ve ever done. But it was good. So very good for our souls. So very good for our kids. So very good for our family. God wouldn’t be any less God if we hadn’t been able to take that trip. But, as has been his consistent pattern, God chose to bless us in the midst of the storm. We are forever grateful.