Opening up to the beauty of differences
Love holds the key.
When autism moves in
A difficult, near-deadly birth opened the door to the fragility of life. As fragile as the birth was, the months following my son’s entrance into the world were shaken by an earthquake, unsettled by a surgery, and rocked by a diagnosis. It seemed that at one fell swoop, the vision I held for the future collapsed. The road I thought we were on as a family took a sharp and unexpected turn. The journey ahead required great patience, maximum resolve, and guts.
Finding myself in dark times when everything should have been happy and light with a brand new baby in the house was more than difficult. I was weighed down by worry and fear. Could I carry the pain, the responsibility? Could I still create the family and the home I wanted?
KeriMeHome is a blog about how life can be a mucked-up mess and a pain in the ass sometimes. It’s also a blog to remember that life can be an exhilarating escapade, an enthralling adventure, and a most jubilant journey.
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Latest Blog Posts
Under the Weather
My eyelids opened to a semi-dark room which made me think it was earlier than my usual wake-up time. It wasn’t, though. Slate gray clouds were pouring out rain; I could hear the drainpipes working overtime. Going through my calendar in my head, I remembered that my husband had a lunch meeting. What a day for a long drive! My thoughts turned toward what Zach and I would do that afternoon. I considered taking him out to lunch, but a [...]
Pick a PEC
Of pickled peppers? Nope. There’s no connection here to the pepper-picking piper. The PEC I am pondering focuses on picture cards. These picture cards posed as the primary form of communication for Zach for a solid decade of his young life. From about age 2 to age 12 (when iPad came along) Zach relied on the PEC system to communicate. It proved a positive, powerful method of communication for a non-speaking person. As a young boy, Zach relied on PECs® [...]
Beautiful~Butterfly~Boy
I can’t recall exactly when Zach began noticing butterflies. It’s a love affair that’s been going on for quite a while now. It may have started after the bees. During the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, which kept him home from school for 14 months, we made a daily trek around our neighborhood. During those strolls he started watching and listening to bees. He’d take himself over to a shrub or a patch of flowers and put his sweet face [...]
When One Door Opens
It was a blistering hot day soon after we moved from the Bay Area to the Central Valley. The Mediterranean climate of the Bay is something I was grateful for during the 20+ years we lived in the outskirts of San Francisco. The farther away from the ocean, the less Mediterranean it becomes; no on-shore breezes from the Pacific, no morning and evening fog banks rolling in to chill the air. […]
sun * son * Son
One foggy morning a few years ago, after I dropped Zach off at his beloved school, I decided to do the coffee shop + laptop thing. I have to admit, I was not in the practice of bringing a laptop to a coffee shop and sipping latte while surfing the internet. “Back in the day,” when I did not know what wi-fi was, I was uncertain how to use it, much less connect to it in Starbucks, where everyone else [...]
The Preston Pére Noël
What little child doesn’t scream, cry, or freeze up when introduced to Santa for the first time? Maybe there are some littles who reach exuberantly for the man with the white beard and round belly (“that shook, when he laugh’d, like a bowlful of jelly” – sorry, couldn’t resist). I’ve seen toddlers sprint toward the velvety, high-backed chair surrounded by Christmas trees, elves, and presents, only to halt suddenly and scream when a face full of fake white hair and [...]
Sense & Sensibilitea
Ordinarily, tea bags are pretty…well, ordinary. Neatly arranged in colorful, perky, perfect-sized boxes or stacked like Pringles® in pretty metal tins, tea bags generally stay perched on a shelf till needed. Whatever their packaging, dressed-up cardboard or embellished metal seems to make up for their ordinary-ness. Tucked away in my pantry are ordinary tea bags of all sorts. Calming herbal concoctions, soothing throat coats, energizing lemon zingers, and more. In Tetris-like fashion, I had, over time, stacked and displayed [...]
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