- Awareness, Creativity, Culture, Love, Parenting, Play, Relationships, Slideshow, Special Needs Parenting, Spotlight
One Mom’s One-Story-At-A-Time Mission
I’m on a mission to profoundly change the way the world views autism…one story at a time. ~ Jodi Murphy My adult son is on the autism spectrum and from the outside he looked just like any other little boy. But his brain is wired differently. He is autistic. The kids at school thought he was weird, so they teased and taunted him, and never invited him over to play. It’s his story, but sadly it’s a universal experience when you are autistic. And when 1 in 68 children are on the autism spectrum and 70% of them say that they are isolated and bullied in school,…
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Special Needs Parenting: Uncoventional Choices and Unconditional Love
Please allow me to introduce myself. I am a soon-to-be-single mother of two special needs children.. I love duct-tape, MacGyver and was born thinking outside the box. I am an independent thinker who often got in trouble in school and college for speaking my mind and not following the crowd. As far as I’m concerned – that qualifies me to be one great special needs mother. Not quite three months ago, I made an irrational, illogical and emotionally-based decision that I had been struggling with for over a year. My bipolar/add/LHON/anxiety/pediatric migraines with aura daughter (Bipolar Girl) was deeply depressed and unresponsive to medication, counseling, social events/play dates, etc. She…
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Parenting :: Swimming the Tide of Autism
This spring marks two years since my son’s Asperger diagnosis. His younger sister has been professionally diagnosed with Asperger’s and nowhere near the spectrum. I am currently in the midst of a divorce with their father, who is a walking billboard for autistic characteristics but refuses my pleas to get evaluated. When April came celebrating Autism awareness, I felt I was already not only quite aware but drowning in a sea of autism. Somehow, I managed to swim the tides for two years unaware of many frequently vicious debates within the autism community. I naively put a blue bulb on our porch on April second, then read such frightening attacks…
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Parenting: Are You a Dream-Stealer?
“Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.” ~Marsha Norman Are you a dream-stealer? Do we as parents put limitations on our kids because of our insecurities, self-doubt and other related issues we had when we were growing up? Do we start to allow the negativity from ignorant thoughts of others to creep into our minds and put a fence around our abilities as parents? Surround Yourself with Positive Role Models: A very powerful leader and role-model said to me recently, if you want better things for yourself and to be a better person, surround yourself with others who you believe are better (at something)…
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Parenting: Navigating Pre-Teens with Special Needs
Navigating through the Pre-Teens: For me, the moment my son turned 10 years-old I felt a life as we knew it was about to change. No longer were the days of thinking he’d stay little forever, racing through the house in his undies & a cape, curling up together under the comforter on a cold Saturday morning, or popping him in the good old Radio Flyer and walking around the neighborhood. No, at that 10 year-old moment I felt a noticeable shift in the dynamics of our family…a shift into the unknown. We were headed into uncharted waters, my family and I in a raft, knowingly paddling into…
