For those of you who read this blog regularly, you know that Penny started kindergarten two months ago, and you know that we couldn't be more pleased with her situation. With that said, as I've also mentioned, Penny has had a tough time "controlling her hands" and following ...

It's a question William asked me a long time ago, and I've been thinking about the answer ever since. I wrote it up for Lisa Belkin's new blog, Parentlode, at the Huffington Post "Explaining Down Syndrome to My Daughter, and to Myself." My post begins:

A few months back, I mentioned ...

This post is an excuse to a) show you what Penny did at her babysitter's wedding shower this past weekend, which is to say, spend an hour trying on different hats and "walk down the aisle" (her words), stop, twirl, and wait for the applause of the forty or so women in the room ...

My mother-in-law used to have a list of "feeling words" on her refrigerator. They were accompanied by a fill-in-the-blank statement, "I feel _________ when you __________." The idea was that you separate the way you feel from the person's action instead of blaming them directly ...

I can understand why lots of people assume that I wrote A Good and Perfect Gift with an audience of parents of children with Down syndrome in mind. It certainly speaks directly to our shared situation, and many parents have written me to say that they went through a similar ...

By now, many of you have already read Notes From a Dragon Mom, Emily Rapp's beautiful and honest meditation about her son Ronan, who is terminally ill with Tay-Sachs disease. She writes,

How do you parent without a net, without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, ...

Yesterday should have been rough. Peter was away, and I had gotten about five hours of sleep. But then, Marilee signed "eat" for the first time. William prayed, "Um, God, please help Dad get home safety with no accidents." Penny got frustrated as she tried to hang a photo on ...