Adults do this to Fiona all the time. They do it to her more than they do it to my other, typically developing kid. These kinds of recall questions aren’t genuine requests for information. “Fiona, are you hungry?…. What was your favorite part of today?…. Did anything today make you angry?” Instead, these are questions in which the questioner possesses the right answer and is waiting for Fiona to dole it out. Continue reading
Here’s a story of my fallibility and my fear, and my figuring out how I might become a halfway-decent ally. At 4:30am this morning, I sat in a hotel shuttle, waiting to head to an airport. With my backpack on … Continue reading
A few months after the #metoo movement shocked not one single woman (because nearly all of us) but perhaps a handful of men, NPR released a year-long investigation on a less reported category of #metoos. It’s a subject you don’t want to … Continue reading
This is the 100th post at Star in Her Eye, so WordPress tells me. Five years ago when I started this blog, it wasn’t with some grand plan in mind. It wasn’t to do what the publishing industry folks call, … Continue reading
Fiona and I have been busy writing, but not blog posts. She’s been writing sentences in kindergarten. I’ve been sorting out a book-project, but I’ve also been writing essays and such that come out in fragmented messes, require many drafts, … Continue reading
This past week, Fiona came home from kindergarten with the usual notes from her teachers, explaining her day. When I read one note, I envisioned party-style confetti raining down on me. It said, She identified all 26 letters of the … Continue reading
On Valentine’s Day, while I was stirring chili and scrolling through the day’s headlines on my laptop, a comment popped up from a Star in Her Eye reader: “We miss you,” she wrote, “and want to hear from you.” I’m … Continue reading
After some hesitation and a brief “will she be welcomed?” conversation with the teacher, I sign Fiona and her sister up for Pre-K Tumbling class. Fiona is a walking, miniature willow tree. Her limbs are thin. Her gait is unstable. … Continue reading
“We are all mobile temples of God,” I read this morning from Father Richard Rohr, and then I took the mobile temples that are my two daughters and the mobile temple that is myself, and mobilized all three of us … Continue reading
Unless you’re a hermit on a mountain somewhere, cut off from all news, you might be getting the impression that the world could soon end, or will for certain end (possibly Tuesday), or maybe even has already ended. I don’t … Continue reading
“Momma! These glasses are broken.” The three-year-old is trying to unfurl those black plastic eye-doctor sunglasses and spread them across her face. “No, they aren’t,” my husband says. He wore them home from his appointment the other day after his … Continue reading
When Fiona was three and a half months old, my husband and I received a phone call. I was in the living room, zipping up a suitcase for our first flight with a baby, counting the short hour or two … Continue reading
It’s not easy to find an AAC consultant in this country. Anyone who’s looking for one knows this. AAC stands for “Adaptive and Augmentative Communication,” and it’s precisely what Fiona uses when she tells me (with her talker) that she wants … Continue reading
Every few weeks I stumble across an article arguing that parents shouldn’t publicly write about their kids. Some of these articles are written by parents who once wrote about their kids but have since changed their minds. Some of these … Continue reading
