Great Spirits

We spent part of the weekend in Alexandria, visiting Eli, Amy, and Andrew.  A and A wanted to attend an event at the National Harbor and asked us if we would stay with Elijah Boo while they did so.

What a nice baby Eli is!  Very good natured, mostly happy, energetic, and flirtatious.  And a good eater.  We had a wonderful time being grandparents, and afterwards A and A took us all out to a Mexican place for an excellent dinner.  The table adjacent to us was laid out for about 20+ guests and we knew from the photos posted everywhere that it was a graduation party for someone named Alex.  And, apparently, it was to be a surprise.  It was a huge surprise, because as soon as Alex walked in (we all recognized her from the photos), everyone at our end of the restaurant cheered and applauded!  Such fun . . .

Early this morning before anyone else was awake, I finished reading The Boy in the Moon.  I found this to be an important book.  Ian Brown is a writer who has a disabled son, as opposed to a parent of a disabled child who wrote a book.  He writes not just of his family's experience, but travels to meet and interview other parents of children with the same or similar syndromes.  He also visits a network of care facilities designed for people whose intellectual capacity is seriously compromised.

In one place he says, "I don't want to minimize the difficulty of raising a handicapped child. . . .  But it's just a mistake to think of them as lesser than.  There's no lesser than.  There's just different from.  It isn't just great minds that matter.  It's great spirits too."   I was well aware of the irony that I was reading this during a visit to my perfect and "normal" grandson.

This book is an excellent read.  One of my commenters wrote me that she was afraid it would be too difficult a read for her inasmuch as her own grandchild had just received a diagnosis of difference.  My thought is that this book would let her know that she is not alone.

One pair of our children has close friends who have a young daughter who is developmentally delayed.  I'm recommending this book to my kids -- it will help them understand their friends a little better and help them to be better friends to them.