Standing at just over 6 feet, I am as tall as I want to be. You won’t catch me on a ladder. I don’t like standing in a chair to change a light bulb. I have been known to get dizzy when swinging too high at the playground. Sometimes even just standing at the top of the three small steps on my front porch looking down at someone on the sidewalk, I get a little panicked.
Karaoke Club
Brush your teeth. Brush your teeth. Every morning, every night; brush your teeth to keep them whiiiite. The kids got a small, portable karaoke machine from Santa this year at Christmas. It came preloaded with about twenty songs, and all day long those songs are played — in their entirety or as a remix —…
Sibling Revelry
January and February in Arkansas are hard on anyone who has to go outside. These months are especially hard when you have little kids who want to go outside. The sky is gray. The river is gray. The cliffs, mountains, trees and buildings taller than three stories are all gray because of the fog that…
Matters of the Heart
February is celebrated as American Heart Month in an effort to raise awareness about heart health and the prevention of heart disease. Kids with special needs are often at an increased risk of heart conditions. Down (Trisomy 21), DiGeorge (22q11.2 deletion), Turner (Monosomy X), Patau (Trisomy 13), Edwards (Trisomy 18), Alagille and other syndromes carry…
“I don’t know how you do it.”
Resilient is a word that has been used to describe me lately. Maybe it was used before now and I wasn’t paying attention, but I am now hearing it a lot. I have heard it so many times, in fact, that I decided to look it up in the dictionary to make sure I…
Extraordinary Estie: An Ordinary Day in a Special Life
Estie Johnson says these words, and also lives by them: Be your best self and live your life to the fullest because you never know what you could achieve. The sky is the limit! A recent high school graduate, Johnson worked as an advocate for people with disabilities before the pandemic. “I have a muscle disease…
The Dirtiest Car in the World
Yesterday Ellie was acting weird at school, so I picked her up early and decided to keep her home today to watch her. At school, her teacher said she kept falling asleep throughout the morning and didn’t want to participate in anything. Typically a Mrs. Kravitz, this was a sign that she likely wasn’t feeling…
Bad Advice
Before he left for work, I made an egg for my husband Ben to eat for breakfast. It was just the two of us in the kitchen and no little ears were around to hear us talking. “I just don’t understand why you think that her learning will slow down or just stop one day,”…
Special Family: Secrets to School Success
Each afternoon when I pick up my daughter from school, I get a peek into a world that is all hers. Ellie, 2, was born with Down syndrome and just this summer she started walking, eating by mouth and wowing us with new words she speaks every day — all things she has worked toward…
Perfect v. Wonderful
I’ve been trying to think of some profound statement on which to end 2020, but all I have is this: We are still standing. (Well, sort of. Between the hours of 5:30 a.m. and 8 p.m. we are destroying, creating and just trying to keep each other from getting hurt, but at 8:02 p.m. we…
