Here's what happens when your kids grow up: You don't have Pop-Tarts in your house anymore, or drawings all over your refrigerator, or a box full of unmatched mittens on the closet floor. Plus, you miss things. You can read the newspaper every day, but all the news that's fit to print isn't all the news…
Read MoreMy granddaughter Lucy is 6 years old and is part of a class of people that is quietly being eliminated in my country. She has Down syndrome, a genetic condition that frightens so many women that 92 percent of those who learn they are carrying babies with it choose to abort.
Dr. Brian Skotko, a genetics fellow at Children's Hospital, fears this number will rise. Prenatal tests are invasive, carry a risk to the fetus, and are given in the second trimester, so many women choose not to have them. But a simple new and non-invasive blood test, to be given early in a woman's pregnancy, is coming, perhaps as early as next year.
Read MoreThey had a normal, typical life. First his. Then hers. Then theirs together. They dated. They fell in love. They got married. Five years later they had a nine-pound baby boy. Twelve months and 11 days after Mark was born, Chuck and Maureen Palermo welcomed their second child, another nine-pound boy. They named him Daniel…
Read MoreChicago in 1830 was a military post and fur station where wolves prowled the streets at night and only 12 families lived. Just 30 years later, it had grown to a city of 100,000 and hosted the Republican National Convention.
I learned this the other day while listening to a book on tape, ``Team of Rivals'' by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which is really all about Abraham Lincoln, but became for me just one more affirmation that change is not endemic to now. Cities grow. Businesses fail. The sand we build our lives on is always shifting. That's life. Nothing stays the same and the world in which we grow up, the world we know, is never the world in which we grow old.
Read MoreWe were on vacation at Rock Harbor waiting for the sun to set - my grown children and their young children, all of us way out on a jetty, the sky pink, the night clear, the bugs, for the moment, somewhere else.
A steel band was playing, calypso music; not Old Cape Cod, but it was nice, festive.
The little kids didn't stay still for long, though.
Read MoreWhen my older daughter became a mother nearly six years ago, I became a grandmother with a brand-new baby to love. But I also became a different kind of mother to my baby. I was useful again. I knew things. I understood. And the most important thing I understood was how much my daughter loved her child…
Read MoreThe chair has been in the family for 65 years. My husband's parents, both born in Great Britain, bought it for their daughter when she was 2 years old. It is child-size but it shrieks "adult," not only because it has a high back, spindly wooden legs, and curved wooden arms, but also because it is covered in green velvet…
Read MoreWhen Nancy Tupper Ling’s childhood friend gave birth to a daughter with Down syndrome, Ling wrote a poem called Our Fragile Emissary. The heartfelt verse quickly landed in e-mail inboxes and on message boards around the world. (You can Google it.) Six years later, Ling wrote a book about the same child, titled My Sister, Alicia May, and what happened next is a tale of fate, serendipity, and maybe something more…
Read MoreBlessed is a word I find myself saying a lot lately. How blessed I am. How blessed my family is. How blessed we are to have Lucy.
Six years ago, I didn't feel blessed. Lucy, my first grandchild, my daughter's child, was 12 hours old when we learned she had Down syndrome. We wept. Three days later, we were told…
Read MoreI don't know much about Dr. Reardon, my ear, nose and throat specialist, except that the man is in love with ears. After all the decades he's been looking at them, you'd think he'd be done. Seen one, seen 'em all. Bring on some toes and elbows, please. But every time he walks into the examining room where I sit with my clogged up ear, he is almost whistling, eager to get to his chart and his very realistic ``you can take it apart and move it around'' facsimile of an ear and explain to me how the middle ear is a hollow chamber in the bone of the skull. He is as earnest as a sonnet.
Read MoreI took more than 200 pictures last Saturday morning. A few are OK. You take pictures of little kids in baseball uniforms and you're sure to get some decent shots. But not one of them comes close to capturing all that was really happening at Devoll Field in Canton last week.
It was opening day for Little League. T-ball division, the smallest players in town. The field swarmed with them, 5- and 6-year-olds in uniforms, sponsored by some of the town's businesses.
Read MoreNancy Tupper Ling lives in Walpole. When her childhood friend gave birth to a daughter with Down syndrome, Ling wrote the baby a poem, ``Our Fragile Emissary,'' a love song that has been e-mailed around the world.
Six year later, Ling wrote her first children's book about this child, ``My Sister, Alicia May.'' She sent it to a Raynham publisher, Pleasant St. Press. The co-owner, Jean Cochran, a children's book author herself, loved the manuscript, bought it, and then went looking for an illustrator.
Read MoreMy grandson, Adam, was talking about turning 5. He was planning his birthday party, naming the friends he was going to invite, telling me that The Backyardigans is the theme he’d chosen this year. "And we’re going to have pretzels and cake and an obstacle course," he said…
Read MoreWaiting. For the phone to ring. For my son on the end of the line. For his voice in my ear. For the words, "It's time, Mom. The baby is coming."
Waiting. For two weeks that's what we’ve been doing. The first baby came two weeks early. The second we believed — mother, father, grandparents, sisters…
Read Moreou know what I love about my letter carrier? You know what I love about all letter carriers?
They show up. Every day, except Sundays and holidays.
Rain or shine, sleet or snow. Election Day. Groundhog Day. The first day of spring? Even one Christmas day, a few years ago. The doorbell rang and there was my letter carrier with a package marked "special delivery."
Read MoreThis is what "internationally renowned" Sherman J. Silber, M.D., writes in his "completely revised and updated" book "How to Get Pregnant," published by Little Brown and Co. last August: "The biggest fear of most pregnant women is that their child will be abnormal, and the most common abnormality they worry about is Down syndrome. ... These children are severely retarded mentally, and they usually die before their thirtieth birthday." He also writes: "We can prevent couples from having to face the horror of giving birth to children with otherwise devastating genetic defects such as Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, mental retardation, etc., that terrify every woman who ever gets pregnant."
Read MoreFive hours in a car. It's a long time for a 5-year-old to be confined. But Lucy never complained. Not a tear. Not a tantrum. Not even a pout.
My granddaughter was happy, listening to Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella," (sung by Julie Andrews; the child has good taste) and singing along. She ate chicken fingers in a nice restaurant overlooking the water, then she was back in her car seat, singing again.
Read MoreJudith Melisi has been on a mission for more than a year now. But last June it became personal.
For months the Halifax mother had been trying to alert the owners of the health club where she works out to the dangers she saw in the child-care room. Candy that little ones could choke on brought in by older kids. Hot coffee brought in by a worker. The bathroom door left open. An electric outlet exposed.
Read MoreWhen I was looking for a dog a few years ago, I came across the Metro South Adoption Center, the satellite shelter for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
A friend suggested the place, which is located on a rural street in Brockton. I took my grandson, Adam. He was 2 at the time.
I expected a few dogs and cats, not rooms full of animals waiting to be adopted. But there they were, a Disney-esque lineup: rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, birds, mice, dogs, cats, even a rat.
Read MoreIt's entertainment. Fluff, not to be taken seriously. And yet, as I watch "American Idol," the contestants all teary because Simon or Paula laugh at their performance or bluntly tell them they can't sing, I find myself thinking about my father at 18.
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