Dear  Teachers, Staff, and Students: Welcome back from Fall Break! I can’t believe an entire quarter of the school year has already flown by. By now you might have met my daughter, Sophie, who is a freshman. If not, maybe you’ve seen her in the halls, at cheer tryouts, or singing at the school’s recent […]

    Sophie is trying out for freshman cheer. Sitting under the fluorescent lights of a big public high school gym for two hours yesterday afternoon, my thoughts veered wildly — from total disgust with our society for condoning (no, make that celebrating) the idea that it’s cool for girls to put on skimpy outfits and […]

Maya was my first real friend who also happened to have a kid with Down syndrome, made difficult but not impossible by the fact that she lived on the other side of the country. And we’d never met. We found one another’s blogs many years ago, when our kids (her son, my daughter) were barely […]

  A couple of things are clear. Eventually, the U.S. Senate will vote on so-called health care reform. And it won’t be pretty. Maybe it won’t be as bad as we think, maybe they won’t cut 22 million people from the rolls. Or maybe it will be worse. I write a lot about Down syndrome, […]

The reviews are in for this morning’s eighth grade production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” or, as Sophie kept calling it all semester, “A Midnight Summer’s Dream.” The production was nothing fancy, held in the library of the public middle school Sophie attends, during first hour drama class. Costumes were makeshift, sets pretty much didn’t […]

    I swear the guy smelled her coming. We had barely set foot in the lobby of The Plaza when he swept up, a slight young man in a dark suit, holding out a small bag of jelly beans. “Would you like these?” he asked Sophie in his best concierge voice. She took the bag […]

For the first two years, Ray repped the family at middle school Career Day, talking about life as a journalist. It was a good thing. Really, what would you rather hear about — the time Ray volunteered to be Tased at the hands of the Mesa Police Department or the last dozen “now open” restaurant stories I […]

  I got an earful from the social studies teacher today at parent/teacher conferences. Apparently Sophie has had a crush on House Speaker Paul Ryan since the fall, which causes her great consternation as she tries to juggle his appearance (good) with his politics (bad), I was told. Today, when the social studies teacher announced […]

  I will admit that I was kind of meh on the whole pussy hat thing, but as soon as a post about the brain hat popped up on Facebook I was all over Etsy, looking for someone to make me three. One for me, one for my daughter, Annabelle, and one for my other […]

We talk all the time about how tough transitions are for kids with special needs. Hard on all kids, to be sure, but particularly tough when your kid’s brain is hard-wired at the cellular level to refuse to budge when requested. Thanks a fucking lot, extra 21st chromosome. But how about how tough transitions are on […]