Leading the Blind

He's a SuperHero! I am so thrilled that you have hoped back on my blog to follow the series I am sharing right now! Last week I introduced this blog series about teaching your child about people with differences. We all want our kids to be decent humans who include and accept people despite their differences,  but sometimes it's hard to know exactly how to teach kids about differences. I started this blog series to give my advice on helping teach your kids about people with difference. I get asked all the time how I would want people to approach us, or how I would recommend handling a question or situation that a child is dealing with. I am honored to be asked these questions and so I wanted to share my heart with you all about acceptance, inclusion, and just some practical ways you can teach your kids to apply those things in the area of people with disabilities. I have so much to say on this topic that I needed to break it up into five parts to make something you coul...

We have all been there, including me. You are innocently grocery shopping or at a play ground or doing some typical activity, when suddenly, your child notices someone with a disability, or difference, and rather loudly and uncouthly proclaims her discovery for everyone within a 3 mile radius to hear. You are embarrassed, and maybe a little ashamed that your child is that kid. You might try to apologize, or maybe you just grab your kiddo and make a run for it, red faced and all. If you haven't experienced this, you just aren't living! haha! Seriously though. I have even been through something similar with two year old, not-yet-talking Chandler, who is around Christian every single day of his life! A friend invited me to a meet and greet of a sweet man named Frederick.  I was so excited to attend this meeting with Chandler in tow. Frederick lived in Rwanda in the 90's during a mass genocide of Tutsi people. We listened to Frederick recant the harrowing day that the bus he ...

Hey all! I'm excited to write about our experience viewing the solar eclipse that happened on August 21, 2017 across the US! We are lucky enough to live near Nashville and be right in the line of totality, so it was a HUGE event in our area. People came from all over to be a part of the experience! I'll just say, it was deserving of the hype! Chris's work allowed their employees to turn their phones off at their desks and come outside for about half an hour to enjoy the event, so I decided that the boys and I would meet him at his work so that we could all be together for such a big event. I wanted my boys to have memories of the event as a family, so we did!  We met Chris at his work about an hour before totality and hung out on the lawn for a bit. I had talked with the boys a lot about the eclipse and what was going to happen. I didn't want them to be scared, because my boys tend to get scared when they don't understand something unusual or are introduced t...

Many of you know that we are Boston Terrier lovers! We have two males, Steel and Kal, who are litter mates. We have had them for about 2 years now and got them as puppies. About a month ago, we noticed that Kal was holding his left eye closed a lot. Boston's are known for their bulgy eyes, so this wasn't the first time the dogs had gotten too rough and hurt an eye. Steel and Kal fight like brothers. Ugh! An old pic I have of these 3! This is rare because they never hold still! haha!  For about a day, we watched it and wiped it with a warm cloth, figuring it was probably sore and would be fine in a day or two. We got up the next morning and Kal was holding his eye open more, which we thought was a good sign, but we noticed that it had a blue haze over it. The haze reminded me of my dog I had when I was a kid living at home with my parents. Ginger lived to be 13, 14, 15 years old (we aren't exactly sure because we found her and picked her up as a stray) and she develope...

Many of you know that I recently decided to take a break from social media. For several reasons, I thought it would be healthy for me to step back for a little bit, but I also feel like God was calling me to a time of "fasting." I felt God calling me to set aside some of the distractions that life has been throwing at me so that I could hear His voice better. I didn't know at first what I would be fasting from, I just knew that I needed to. So, I prayed and waited to hear from God. Social media was the obvious choice fairly quickly. Even just being on Facebook recently has really been difficult for me, as some of you may know. There has been an influx of negative and hateful comments on pretty much every single thing I post. I always joke that I could post "I love chocolate chip cookies" on Facebook and someone would be highly offended and tell me how terrible of a person I am. It has always been a joke but what makes it funny is that tinge of truth running ...

1st day of school!  I'm sure many of you have already seen some social media posts about it, but I wanted to take some time to really dive in and address Christian's upcoming school year and what it's looking like so that you guys would all know what's going on. For all of our friends who keep up with Christian and his progress, I figured you would be interested and concerned to know, and I am happy to share. :)  I also wanted to answer some questions about it that I thought you guys might have, because it is something new to us and foreign to most people. The majority of folks do public school, so this isn't the traditional route. Sooo.... YES! We are homeschooling! So, the obvious first question is "Why?" Well, there are a couple of reasons that I chose to homeschool Christian this year. Probably the most compelling reason was how bad Christian's last school year ended up being. We were driving 2 hours each way to get him to school, leavi...

I've received a few comments recently on Facebook that are....thought provoking. One proclaimed, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" The commentor was referring to Christian's face and how I could be so bold as to post his photo for other people to see. She literally demanded that I explain to her why I hadn't had Christian's eyes sewed shut, and informed me, which is news to me, that I was exposing Christian to infection and putting him in danger. Then she accused me of withholding surgeries from Christian so as to create a "shock value" of his appearance. It's amazing how much strangers think they know about another stranger's medical condition and health, but it happens. This isn't the first and only comment I've received along those lines, and I'm sure I'll hear it a few more times in my life.  Obviously people like this are uncomfortable with Christian's disability, or disabilities in general, or maybe just differences among ...