Summer is a time for kids. School is out. You get to stay up a little later, sleep a little later, relax a little more. It’s no different for our kids here at Cleveland Christian Home. Although they still participate in treatment every day by attending groups and one-on-one sessions with their therapists, their days are definitely geared toward letting them do what they need to do best – be kids!
Last week, the boys in our Intensive Treatment Center were treated to a water park-sized slip-n-slide. Their shrieking and laughter played to the backdrop of motorcycles revving along Lorain Avenue. It was one of the best sounds I’ve heard in a long, long time. It sounded like a normal summer day at CCH, where we weren’t world-weary from the long-reaching tentacles of COVID. Other boys splashed around in the pool, thrilled to cool off and burn off the day’s pent-up energy, spent just waiting to get there.
There was never a longer 30 minutes than the ones you had to wait after lunch as a kid before you could get in the pool, for fear of cramping and sinking and all other manner of possible impossibilities that might happen if you got in the water too soon after a meal. Imagine having to get through an entire morning of treatment and then lunch! Now THAT is patience! Our boys deserve a great deal of praise for the equanimity they’ve demonstrated this summer. And throughout the entire spring, really.
We all know that life is not the same since the outbreak of COVID, but for our boys, whose lives are already so restricted, they have adapted amazingly well for not being able to leave campus to go to Cedar Point or camping or to baseball games. Our staff have done an amazing job of keeping them informed and safe without inciting panic, and for kids who already have emotional and behavioral challenges, it truly does feel like divine intervention that they have simply rolled with these punches. Or maybe it’s that they had no prior expectations or are accustomed to doing without. Or most likely, all of the above.
Regardless, we are grateful that, thus far, our kids have been able to face even more challenges in their already taxed lives, and that they have been doing so with amazing alacrity. Of equal importance to our needs are our successes. Now is the time to reflect and focus on the things for which we can be truly grateful.