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Showing posts from May, 2016

Virtual walking, and Team Down Syndrome

Hi all!  Evie here. I haven't learned how to walk yet, but I found out that I can be a virtual walker and still help to raise money for Team Down Syndrome at the Boston Childrens Hospital.  Please consider donating to my team so we can help to support the Down Syndrome Clinic, which has been instrumental in my family's life in the past 2 years. Here is my very own personal page! Thank you for your support and love! Love, Evie

The greatest guessing game of all

The greatest guessing game of all is...how to motivate Evie to eat.  Someone was surprised that we actually count the number of BITES (and not ounces) that Evie takes. Well, that's because that's all she'll eat by mouth.  We are averaging 5-8 bites a day, although every once in awhile she'll eat more than 20 bites for our nanny, who is definitely our MVP. The end goal is to cut down on her g-tube feeds so that she'll be hungrier. When we get clearance for having gained back all the weight she lost this winter, we will start the adventure! In the meantime, we definitely have learned some helpful tips for those for which eating is not second nature. Here are some of the finer points of eating we have learned: 1.  A child with oral aversions or sensitivities can be very sensitive to where the food falls on her tongue.  When we feed her with a spoon, she does fine with food on the tip of her tongue.  But any food towards the middle of her tongue makes her gag. 2.

Baring my soul at work, and the future of people with Down Syndrome

I just laid it all out there. I hadn't woken up and gone to a communication and teaching conference thinking that I was going to be so vulnerable with my colleagues, but when we were asked to give a 2 minute talk on any topic of our choice, I knew I had my topic. "NO LIMITS." I started by saying that I wanted to share my journey with Down Syndrome, and to convince them not to limit their expectations of people who have DS. I told them my theme was NO LIMITS.   This is totally a popular tag line in the DS Community, but they had never heard it before. As I told them that we had found out at 10 weeks in utero that our daughter had DS, and that she was a girl, I started to realize that I might just cry while I told my story to my coworkers. But it was too late--I had already started my story.  With a voice that started out strong and quickly became shaky, I told my colleagues that my initial response to the diagnosis was to think that my daughter would never go to