Miss Shannon opens with friendly Saturday greetings and briefly lists her professional roles and her identity as a parent of a teen on the autism spectrum. This orients viewers to her perspective and why she’s leading this session.
Miss Shannon opens with friendly Saturday greetings and briefly lists her professional roles and her identity as a parent of a teen on the autism spectrum. This orients viewers to her perspective and why she’s leading this session.
Shannon shares gratitude for participating in a benefit gala for Opportunity Partners, explains the organization's mission supporting people with developmental disabilities, and notes why fundraising matters. She reflects on how the event connected to her family goals for her son.
She recounts meeting parents who were further along in similar journeys and how their shared experiences gave her helpful, manageable glimpses of future transitions. This section sets up the idea of preparing gradually instead of overwhelming oneself with future worries.
Shannon introduces her tomato plants and explains the gardening concept of 'hardening'—acclimating seedlings to a new environment—and even shares a playful upside-down pot idea. She then ties that process to parenting transitions, advising slow acclimation and using advice and resources to ease into future changes.
She invites viewers to identify small preparatory actions they can take, mentions her own upcoming paperwork and planting plans, and thanks the community while announcing the next meetup time. The segment ends with warm well-wishes and a friendly sign-off.
Good morning, everyone. Happy Saturday to you. If you happen to be watching me on a Saturday, if you're watching somewhere in the future, happy whatever day it is when you are connecting. It's a sunshiny day. Hey, Chris, welcome in. Welcome in some fidgets that my ex-in-laws sent for my kiddo. So that was nice. He's got these great fidgets that he likes. If you are not familiar with me, I am Miss Shannon Pauls. I am by trade a variety of word related things like a comedian, a corporate speaker, a voice actor, event emcee, and a benefit auctioneer.
By everything else by heart, I am the proud parent of an adorable 18 year old kiddo who happens to be high supports on the autism spectrum. So I'm happy to join you for today's edition of Comedy Through the Chaos. I want to show gratitude for a couple of things that have been going on in my life this week. So first of all, this as far as again by trade, I do a lot of what we'll call just benefits and galas this type of season. And last night I was blessed to be part of a benefit gala for an organization here in Minnesota, primarily the Twin Cities, called Opportunity Partners.
And Opportunity Partners is a wonderful organization that has a variety of group homes and day programs and work programs and a variety of things that support our community members with developmental disabilities in a variety of different ways. And so that was wonderful to support them last night. And one of the reasons why I was extra grateful that I was able to support them, this has been a good week as far as things that fuel your soul, is because before they asked me, to do this benefit a couple of years ago.
They were like, maybe you haven't heard of us. And I said, actually I have heard of you. I hadn't met anybody at Opportunity Partners, but they had been on my radar because often, because of where my son is on the spectrum when we're having his individualized education plan meetings, A lot of times they're like, hey mom, what are your goals from later? And I had said, I just want him to have the skill set to be able to have his friends in a day program or as I call it, a hobby job when he's older at a place like Opportunity Partners.
And so it has been very gratifying to have them come into my circle and for me to go, no, I'm familiar with you and I think you do wonderful work. And so it was a wonderful evening. We got to help raise some funds because I'm not sure everybody understands how the funding for these kind of place works. Like yes, there is, we'll call it government funding for certain things, but it only covers pretty much the bare minimum. So a lot of these organizations still need to fundraise. So I was happy to support them.
And one of the things I thought was interesting is that there's a number of parents that are there with kids that may be older. So it's nice to be able to talk to them And it really, really, I'm going to make a weird analogy here, but stick with me. Stick with me, Chris, because it's going to make sense in a second. I have always been fortunate that there were people in my circle or that I would come across the path of who were a little farther ahead in the journey than I was. So they had some older kiddos.
So they, as we just met, not necessarily can you sit down and give me all the advice on where this whole path is going? But what they were able to do, just as we were getting to know each other, they would kind of mention things that would be a little farther ahead than I was. Like what it was like when they did the transition from middle school to high school, from high school to transition programs, from transition programs to whether they were in a day program or anything like that. So I got a little exposure into these things without inundating myself in future information when I was trying to handle the information that I have right now.
And here's where I want to make the example. As part of my, the comparison is better than the example. Here's what I meant as the comparison. As part of my local, I mean recent mindfulness practice, I'll call it, I've been trying to do more gardening. You know, I need, I'm one of those people that in order to recharge, I kind of need something to do, something to do. And the completionist me likes doing certain things. So with the chaos that we have of the world, I'm like, you know what, it's not a bad time to like kind of lean back and learn how to do some gardening, make yourself a little more self-sufficient.
make our own little personal ecosystem here at our home that we're fortunate to be able to do. And it's something good for me to do to keep myself busy because your lady is of a certain age and it's not like I'm be out in the club. I'm not gonna be out in the club anymore. So I need something else to do. So I've decided that a lot of that is gonna be gardening. And so I have a variety of starter plants that I have been growing in my home and waiting for the opportunity to transition them outside when they are ready.
And so what I learned during my research for this whole process is that often before you put them into a situation outside, you don't want to just grow them inside, even if you have them under grow lights and all this stuff. You can't just toss them outside. You have to do a thing called hardening. And so hardening is basically once they get to a certain size, you put them outside a little bit every day, a little more and a little more so they can kind of get used to what the next environment is going to be.
So I'm going to introduce you to my tomato plants. So these are my tomato plants. I started them from just squeezing some cherry tomatoes into this pot. I let them slip over in the windowsill, put a little grow light on them because part of the day is sometimes very cloudy here. in the Twin Cities where I live and I let them do their thing and I've been watching them and so now they're to the point because of this size that I'm in the hardening part of their experience so every day over the last couple weeks I've been putting them outside a little bit so little sun, little shade, little just let's get used to the next phase of what you are going to be before I try to put them in an actual pot and see if they can grow I will show you that when I do it I saw an interesting thing on the YouTube on how to grow in a pot upside down.
It's hard to explain, but I think it'll work out great. We're going to give it a shot. So that hardening process, that exposing them a little bit every day to the next environment that they will be a part of feels very similar to the process that I have been fortunate to have in my journey with my kiddo and making sure that I'm providing him. Instead of jumping full into the next transition, the next journey that we're in our life, I've had instead the opportunity by getting advice from other people to do little bits of research, to know that something might be coming up, to familiarize myself with what the next part of this journey can be.
And that has been really helpful. And so I use that as an example, because I think that's something that we can all learn from. If we know that something might be coming, you don't want to mire yourself in all of it too soon. You got to be spending a lot of that energy being focused on where you're at as well and making sure that you're giving yourself the opportunity to be present in the place where you are. I think that's very important. It's something that I've had to practice, not flash forwarding, not making sure that I'm not fortune telling into the future.
But I do think that it is of value to sit there and go, if there's certain things that I'm probably going to have to do, there's ways to use the advice, to use the wise counsel that you have, to use your ability to gather some information as you go so that you do have the ability to have a better transition into what you're doing next instead of dropping yourself before you're ready, before you've had the chance to harden into the next scenario. So that is what I encourage us to focus on for the rest of this week.
What is it in your life that you might be able to sit there and go, I'm not ready to dive fully into this, but there's a couple of things I can maybe start noodling on. There's a couple of things that I can do, some resources I can gather, a team I might need to start building. some options I might want to start exploring on this journey so that when I get to the next step, I don't have to dive into it. I can actually make sure that maybe I've had a little bit of opportunity to acclimatize myself to whatever is coming next.
So I encourage you to work on that. Personally, I'm going to be working on a couple of things. I have some interesting paperwork involved with my kiddo for the next part of his journey, so that'll take me some time. over the next couple of weeks because again, I have listened to the wise counsel in my circle. Ha ha. And I'm going to be planting these out into their next environment very soon. So we appreciate you. Speaking of environments, we appreciate you being part of the environment here in the cadre sphere.
Hopefully we are providing some little tidbits here and there, providing some resource, some community. a place to go, oh wait, I didn't think about it that way, or hey, I thought about it that way and I'm not the only one. All of those are correct answers and there are no wrong ones. So we will continue to hopefully be a space for all of us to hang out and figure out what next steps are together. m. Central Hopefully everything's working on that as well. And we'll see what the next steps are together.
So I hope that the day treats you well. If it doesn't, shame on it, not shame on you. I appreciate you all, everybody. Be well to yourself.
