Special Needs Related Articles & Blog Posts

Today’s post offers parents some information on who may be part of their baby’s care team in the NICU – and what, in general, their roles may be. There may be many different members on your baby’s care team – especially in a Level III NICU. These care providers may rotate in and out based [...]

A first step to understanding the NICU is learning the lay of the land. Be patient with yourself – you are getting adjusted to a strange and foreign terrain – but it is important to know where and why your baby is in a given NICU. NICUs are generally classified as either Level II or [...]

Every expectant mother eagerly awaits the day when she will finally hold her baby in her arms. But for mothers of premature or very sick newborns – that moment is postponed as their baby is whisked away by a team of highly trained physicians and nurses to be cared for in the most high-tech of [...]

It can be a challenging time in many ways to have your baby placed in the NICU. It wasn’t the new beginning you hoped for. Here are a few things you can do to that can make a difference:

If you can’t hide it, embrace it. From fairly early on after being diagnosed with Arthritis, my joints started to change. I used to get embarrassed at people looking at my hands – they look like an 80-year-old woman’s hands. A newspaper reporter once wrote in what was actually a lovely article written about me, [...]

As my family prepares for another weekend, I have to face the inevitable decision about “What are we going to do?”  This is a never-ending question from my children.  My two children who are not disabled always want to do the stuff normal families do…go to a movie, go shopping, or go out to a [...]

I have recently reconnected with some old friends from high school and college thanks to the modern miracle of the Internet. It’s always a thrill to get reacquainted with people who I shared so many important experiences. But, as we start to share about our lives I am always struck by the same realization…my life [...]

I was talking to a friend of mine today who is raising two beautiful girls, one who is a young teenager and another who is a “tweener” with autism. We began one of our many conversations about our lives and the challenges we face. Our conversation focused on the balancing act we walk to make [...]

The great joy of being a parent is celebrating your children’s success. Every developmental milestone reached by our babies is carefully recorded in scrapbooks. We save report cards, trophies, ribbons, medals and all the wonderful trinkets our children bring to us for their brilliance in academics, sports, or civic clubs. We share their work with [...]

Children and teens with CFS have many of the same issues as other children with chronic illnesses, confounded by the fact that they have an illness which is poorly understood, often misunderstood, and too often misdiagnosed. And what do we tend to do when we don’t understand an illness?