I called my mother early yesterday morning to report that I’d solved the problem of where to send Sophie for junior high. “OK, here’s what we have to do. Get Chuck Coughlin’s wife pregnant. She’s older — maybe she’ll have a baby with Down syndrome. Then he’ll solve the problem.” If you’re lucky enough to […]

More and more, these days, I find myself thinking about salad. Not that kind of salad. I’m actually about to make a meatloaf this evening. The Salad Days. I’ve written about them several times before — prematurely, sort of like how I decided to have my midlife crisis at 38. But now they are upon […]

If you have not seen this instructional video — made by Disney in 1946 — it’s worth 10 minutes of your time. I have heard that it was banned, but I haven’t been able to verify that. Apparently it won the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” and was shown to tens of millions of high […]

About halfway through the “how to teach your child with Down syndrome about puberty” seminar this past weekend, it dawned on me that everything I learned from puberty came from Judy Blume. Okay, if we’re going to get technical, you can throw in a reel-to-reel film they showed in third grade and a pair of […]

I neglected to mention the other day that I haven’t had the nerve to actually watch “Pink Slip” — the decades-old instructional video about menstruation created for girls with developmental disabilities that we used to show at parties for laughs — since Sophie was born. Here’s my post from the other day about Down syndrome […]

Note: Apparently the link in this post to Pink Slip is broken. Here’s one that works for part one and one for part two.  Sophie’s bra collection is far more extensive than my own — a fact that will likely make you smile, if you’ve met both of us. As of this morning when I […]