On the Calendar: Monday

I've been working on time concepts with Wade.  Every evening before he goes to bed we talk about what the next day will be and what he will be doing at what time during the day.  One of his music therapists taught us a great little song that talks about yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and every morning we sing that while talking about the day's schedule.  That great printable above is from School Sparks.

I have his monthly schedule written out on a calendar page, and each evening Wade draws an X across the day that is all done.  Last year I just did a weekly schedule because each day of every week was the same.  This year though his schedule is not the same each week so it was better to write (in pencil!) the month's activities.

So this week I'll tell a bit about what he does each day in therapy or school and also one or more activities we do at home.

This morning he had Yellow Time with Mommy.  Don't ask me why it's called Yellow Time; that's what he named it and so that's what it is.  But he looks forward to it as much as if it would be Ice Cream Time.

We tossed balls into a container. 

 These little balls are easy to make and easy to throw.  One of Wade's ot's gave me the idea.  Randall made these for Wade's Christmas gift one year, but you can just use a handkerchief and stuff it with plastic bags or with quilt batting.  Tie it shut with a ribbon or with a tight rubber band and you have a great therapy toy!

In the afternoon, Wade had music therapy with Andrea.  They were talking about fall things today, so there were lots of new and old vocabulary words, which led to my favorite quote of the day.

Andrea:  Wade, what do you eat on Thanksgiving Day?

Wade:  Cats!

Broken and Improved

My aunt made a wise observation about the broken Angel of Hope:  "She will look just fine glued together.  It will just show that she has character and will make one little boy remember."

What a great commentary on life that statement is!  It does, after all, take the experiences of life to break our pride, build our character, and cause us to remember.

Remember the wonderful story of the Velveteen Rabbit.

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

As my friend reminded me when she gave me the gift, the Angel of Hope symbolizes the mission of  "sharing the light of hope and courage".  And I cannot do that unless I am broken and worn off enough to be "real".

So here is the Angel of Hope today, new and improved, because she symbolizes sharing not only the light of hope and courage, but also the remembrance of fear and despair.  And out of that remembrance will come the compassion that will make her real.

Dancing with Common Sense

The Angel of Hope got broken the other day, by a very little boy who threw a ball too high in a room where he wasn't supposed to be throwing balls.

I loved that angel because it was given to me by a dear friend and mentor who somehow, without being told, divined that I loved all Willow Tree art.  Kindred spirits are like that, I guess.

But now it's broken, like Dagon.

And in the words of Sarah Ban Breathnach, I once again remember that "learning to shrug is the beginning of wisdom."  Or perhaps learning when to shrug and when not to shrug.

Another friend sent me a quote that I love because it presents the perfect picture of the balance of shrugging.  "Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds.  A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."  William James


So tonight I'm dancing with Common Sense and gluing the Angel of Hope and remembering my very favorite quote of all.

"I have plenty of common sense:  I just don't use it!"  Christopher Strite

Budget-Friendly Homeschooling

This was Wade's idea for low-cost writing practice--no paper, pencils, crayons, chalkboards, chalk, or erasers  required.

It's also environmentally friendly:  it doesn't contribute to global warming or destroy the ozone, trees, sea turtles or spotted owls.

You can buy it for free here on our blog.

The Schoolmaster Called Failure

All right.  I'm going to get this off my chest right at the beginning.


When it comes to caulking anything, I am a definite failure.

I have other failures to my name also, but Caulking is the monster staring me in the face right now.

Somehow I have managed to live my life thus far without making an intimate acquaintance with Caulking, in spite of the fact that we built a new house and then fixed up the other one.

But now he has hunted me down.  And it's a relationship that, frankly, is on the rocks.

It all started with the economy going down the tubes for general contractors like Nevin and with opportunity leading us down a long road to establishing a new business in food production.  And if you want to blame it on Obama or Bush, you can, but I'd rather think there is a Divine hand nudging us in this direction.


It's all a detailed and complicated story, but in the end it involves spending more time and money than you would think, and building a processing facility in the former garden spot, and putting in a swimming pool at the same time which sounds totally bizarre, but makes sense in an odd sort of way in conjunction with the fire department.  And it involves making salad dressings and barbecue sauces to start out with and adding other items somewhere along the way.


It also includes a dream to be successful enough to someday hire people with disabilities to work with us because we see this as a need that society is struggling to fill.


But before we can succeed in the building of this dream, we must face the realities.  Like caulking.


"Apply a bead of caulk along the edge of the trim before painting the final coat," the instructions say.


It sounds so simple, but somehow I don't think they are talking about the kind of beading burping out of my gun.  Pop beads, I think is what they're called.


And it is scant comfort to realize that God gave me 10 fingers so I'd have plenty to rotate through as I wipe gobs from the woodwork.


And what do you do about corners?  I mean, I can understand in a limited way the innies, but what about the outies.  It's like trying to ski up the pointed tip of a snowplow.


Which leads me back to the subject of failure.


I suppose anyone who has started a new business thinks about the possibility of failure.  New adventures involve learning new ways of doing things.  Making salad dressing for public consumption is a bit different than making small amounts in your own kitchen.  How do you get every batch the right consistency?  How many flops will we create that will run like water instead of salad dressing?  Or how many will ooze like, well, caulk, for instance?


I read a magnificent commentary recently by Paul Tough in New York Times.  It was called "What If the Secret to Success Is Failure?" 


It is a lengthy article, but well-worth reading and considering.  Headmaster of one of New York's most prestigious schools, Dominic Randolph makes some surprising judgments on modern American education.  Below are some excerpts taken from the article.

The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained...is character — those essential traits of mind and habit that were drilled into him at boarding school in England and that also have deep roots in American history. “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure." 


“The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”


Randolph wants his students to succeed, of course — it’s just that he believes that in order to do so, they first need to learn how to fail.


David Levin, the co-founder of the KIPP network of charter schools and the superintendent of the KIPP schools in New York City also weighs in with the same conclusions.


As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class. 

I found the article to be a refreshing breath of air in a world where only perfection seems admirable.  

Think about it though.  What gymnastics coach would put a beginner on the high beam without first teaching him how to fall?  And why should it be any less important in the rest of life to teach our children how to fall?

One of my favorite mantras for our boys is that failure is only a mistake if you fail to learn from it.

And one of our favorite books at the moment is Beautiful Oops by Barney Saltzberg which is a children's book that is profound in its simplicity.

Through the eyes of an artist, mistakes become design elements. 

"Think of your mistakes," he says, "as an opportunity to make something beautiful".

I like that.  So you messed up today.  How will you build on that knowledge to make something better tomorrow?  Our children need to hear this message from us.

So when, in the future you're shopping at Save-A-Lot and you see runny bottles of salad dressing labeled Beautiful Oops Marinade, you'll know the inside story.

And as for the caulking failure, well, I'm thinking of just signing my name on the office wall and calling it modern art.

Wordy Wednesday

Language has been the slowest part of Wade's development.  His receptive language is considerably more advanced than his expressive language, but both are lagging.

It has been interesting to observe, however, that he really doesn't learn so very differently from other children, but he just smells the roses longer at each spot before he moves on.  This lingering in the rose garden has enabled me to examine with greater clarity the processes that take place in developing ordinary skills and to become aware of how to break down those processes into small steps that are not so overwhelming.

And the more I learn, the more I am stunned at the way the Creator made us.  Truly, the half has not been told, because it hasn't even been discovered yet.

So, as Wade's vocabulary is expanding, so is mine, which is proving to be good cerebral exercise for each of us.

However, on my way to town one evening with all three boys, I was annoyingly aware that one of them was mass-producing excessive vocabulary, blah, blah, blah, all the time with never a break, and it was getting to be TOO MUCH.  So as any good mother would, I opened my mouth to say, "Would you please be quiet?"

Then it occurred to me.  That was Wade talking non-stop!  We had waited a long time for this moment.

And I shut my mouth and smiled.

It was such a delight then to go home and tell Nevin, "Guess what!  I almost had to tell Wade to stop talking so much tonight!  Isn't that great?"

Every day now, I am treasuring hearing him express his thoughts with that refreshing perspective little people have.

So here are some Wednesday words of gold.

"Mom, coughies!"  (he had the hiccups but couldn't think of the right word)

Dad, that's enough! (when Nevin reached for more chips)

And when he got a picture in the mail just for him of his cousin Kay Wren: "That's cute!  I love it!"

He is currently tucked in bed sleeping with the picture.

And I think that's cute! I love it!

All the Things He'll Never Do

When Wade was born with Down syndrome, we immediately thought of the limitations we imagined would be part of the script of his life.  During that first week as we waited for test results to come back, I tried not to think the long thoughts I was thinking.  And when Wade failed his first, second and third hearing tests I looked at him sleeping soundly and wondered if this was only the beginning of many failures.

But the day the definitive test came back, in the midst of my tears,  I suddenly had another thought:  Wouldn't I rather have him be like this than to be evil?

And then my thoughts took a different road.

Think of all the things he'll never do!


He'll never rob a bank.


He'll never be a threat to anyone.


He'll never hold someone hostage or commandeer a school shooting.


He'll likely never kill someone because he's driving under the influence of alcohol.


He won't embezzle millions from his employer.


He'll never abort innocent babies.


And he'll never, never fly big planes into twin towers.



Now, I humbly realize that I, like Adam and Eve, have lived my life under the delusion that a knowledge of good and evil is desirable.

And I look at Wade and realize that I, too, would really rather not know evil.  But I must, because only to him and to those like him has been given the wonderful Gift of Innocence.

And it is this beautiful Gift that connects me daily to that Better World where, someday once again, we will know only Good.

What Is Normal?

Every so often, situations arise that make me think,  "I wonder what a normal mother would do."

And then I wonder why I don't think of myself as being normal.

I suppose it's because even after 12 (almost 13!) years of mothering, I still feel bewildered and blundering.  "Why are you always praying for wisdom?" Chris asks.

Years ago, it seemed to me that mothers of this advanced maternal age would be the settled and sensible, if-you-do-this-that-will-happen type of sages.

It also seemed quite obvious at one point in my life that a + b = c.

But some days now I'm not so sure but what a + b = g or x or even z .  Who knows?

And conversations like this don't help.

Chris:  God said that Job was a perfect man, but Job said things about God that weren't true, so how could he be perfect?

Wade:  Tigger is best; Tigger is best!

Randall:  I wonder who was tempted to pick my nose before I was.

Me: And how does this relate to anything?

Randall: Well, the Bible says there is no temptation new to man.

Wade: Tigger is best!!

Randall:  And how in the world are we going to give account for every word we say?  Isn't that going to take an awfully long time?  For example, when God says, "All, right, Randall, why did you say A?"  and I'll have to say, "Well, A is an article, which means it's an adjective used to describe a noun......"

Wade:  TIGGER IS BEST!!

And I have absolutely nothing to say about that.

So I'll just post birthday pictures.

"I wonder," said Chris, "if I'll get stuck like Pooh in the Honey Pot."

Well, anyway, it was good to the last smackerel.

Tigger really is the best for a new eight-year-old and his buddy.

Everyone must wear party hats, decreed Christopher.

And Wade sang "Happy Birthday" to everyone whether or not it was your birthday.

In summary, the older I get, the more I believe that Patsy Clairmont was right:  normal really is just a setting on your dryer.

Wonderful World

The faces of Down syndrome...

*Photography by Coleen Barnhart

It's October Again...

...Down Syndrome Awareness Month.

Join us every day this month as we celebrate the epiphany of 47 chromosomes.

And as you journey with us,  may our time together become an educational walk that will change our lives forever.