So far, I have not failed at high school. This morning — the first back after the two-week winter break — Sophie popped out of bed, drank her Carnation Instant Breakfast, and chose a cute new outfit. She refused to brush her hair, but found her ID, remembered her lunch, and cranked Stevie Wonder, […]
Sophie’s lawyer asked me to write down some concerns in anticipation of her annual IEP meeting next week. (IEP stands for Individualized Education Plan — the living legal document that guides/dictates the educational life of a kid with a disability.) I smirked. Perfect timing for an airing of grievances. I started this blog to catalog […]
Election results burning in my ears, last November I made a mix tape called “Gratitude.” The idea was to ratchet back the hate and give some thanks, but by the second or third song I’d pulled out R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” and wasn’t looking back. This year my Gratitude […]
Down Syndrome Awareness Month was a bust this year. For Sophie and me, anyway. Okay, that’s not exactly true. In a lot of ways, October was a terrific month, particularly when it came to educating others about Down syndrome. I got a piece published on the New York Times parenting site, and I traveled […]
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 […]
