Essays Fiction and Poetry by Andrea LeDew
For Random Learning Comes
Essays Fiction and Poetry by Andrea LeDew
These are blogposts more than a year old
A little over two weeks ago, I attended WordCamp Orlando. This Florida event lasted from Friday through Sunday. The Friday session was an optional, day-long, Workshop Day, followed by two full days of classes, delicious meals prepared by the college’s cooking school, chats with sponsors and networking. For which I felt completely unprepared. And a bit …
I hope you are all tucked up nice and safe, anticipating Hurricane Florence’s imminent arrival on the US East Coast. In case any of you are in the mood to just wallow in “hurricania,” I have plenty of posts to suit your needs. Since I live in Florida, thoughts of hurricanes occupy a huge …
WordPress turned fifteen this past month (5/27/18). I first heard this news on Meetup and Slack. My local WordPress group is having a party. By that I mean, of course, an open lab, at which there will be cake. Fifteen is 1500 in Computing Years I have a fifteen-year-old, so I appreciate how long it’s …
When I first started homeschooling eight or nine years ago, I was terrified of science and higher-level math. How could I, a mere English major, tackle such a difficult area of learning and pass it on to my children? This notion, that children should spend time doing STEAM activities, was just then starting to be …
Perhaps your children never made honor roll while they were in school. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons you pulled them out, or felt tempted to. If so, this post is for you and yours. What is Honor Roll For, Anyway? In civilian life, honor is almost an outdated concept. We think of Alexander Hamilton …
Living in my house means growing accustomed to things being out of place. Peanut butter smeared on the roll of paper towels. A random sock in the center of the floor. A bottle of ketchup, with its lid hinged open, abandoned on the counter. Dishes, strewn like offerings, before the altar of the desktop monitor. …
I originally wrote this post in 2018. I was privileged to enjoy participating in a co-op with all kinds of moms. What follows are my impressions of just some of the many ways there are, to be a homeschool mom. Updated for formatting in April 2021. Thanks for coming by to read! In my …
I may be stating the obvious, here. But kids with developmental disabilities face many daunting obstacles over the course of their young lives. Often, they spend significantly more time overcoming these challenges than their typical siblings and friends do. The Race Typical kids start the race with a nice, open, level lane in front of …
Spring. This is the time of year, even in the coldest climate, when your thoughts turn to gardens. You may not, necessarily, spend a lot of time thinking about the work of gardening: the clearing of the spent beds, the weeding, the digging, the planting, the fertilizing, the mulching. But you do relish and long …
This was originally published on the blog hop Simple Homeschool’s A Homeschool Day In The Life. The theme is Day In the Life, and I outlined a day that would make a pirate blush, in terms of chaos and mayhem. That is to say, not atypical. Hope you enjoy taking a peek! …
This essay was first published in early 2018, the day after the Parkland massacre in South Florida. A young man returned to his high school –named after Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, the author of River of Grass, a scientific love song to the Florida Everglades. He then proceeded to open fire, killing seventeen students. With …
When you’ve had your smartphone for a while, you accumulate a lot of clutter. You know the kind I mean: old texts, emails from people you hardly remember, screenshots, reminders and notes to yourself, bookmarks, saved articles and e-books. Our phones have taken the place of photo albums, journals, messages scrawled on the back of …
When my eldest two kids, my girls, were teenagers, one of their favorite things to do was to go to the used book store. The one downtown. It is nothing much to look at, on its face. As you walk in, sometimes past a homeless person who is taking a break from the library nearby, …
When you are a homeschooling parent, and even more so, when you are a homeschooling parent with a special needs child, your life can be one endless list of things that should be done. At any given time: The house needs cleaning, sorting, or clutter-busting. The kids need clean clothes, meals, or exercise. Your spouse …
We are having a rare bout of cold weather in North Florida. And when I say “cold”, I am not using the regional definition, that is, anything under 60 degrees Fahrenheit. I am talking twenties and thirties here. Snow was reported. I had to scrape frost off my car. Such things are not common around …
Warm. Soft. Cozy. This is the time of year when we snuggle under them, wrap ourselves in them, tuck old and worn ones under our favorite shivering pets, cover our legs with them, ready for an invigorating sleigh ride. And rumor has it, some of us even knit them! I am not such …
Asking for help is hard. My parents were always the ones who fought over who paid the bill. I remember my mom throwing cash into the window of a relative’s departing car, rather than “owe” her the price of a dinner. This is where I come from. As a result, I have always found it …
This was the first Thanksgiving I have not hosted in a long time. I originally intended to host. I invited my parents and members of my family who don’t live here currently and asked them all to come to my house. It was going to be a celebration of my newfound mobility, a six-month reunion …
When my kids were little, every time they interacted with strangers, I felt a little boost of pride. Once, my kids were polite. My parents cared about politeness. My mom had an old copy of Emily Post, where we would look up the proper way to do things. Which fork goes where. How long you …
Halloween and Christmas are good gauges for growing up. As parents, we’re never quite ready for the changes. They always seem to come too soon. But our kids let us know, in little, silent ways, when something, that was once important, loses its allure. The past few days, I’ve been reading a lot of …
One of the common beliefs about people with autism is that they see things differently. Temple Grandin, the world-renowned celebrity and architect of livestock facilities and contraptions, who also happens to have autism, has often said that she thinks in pictures. Rather than having a method of sorting through thoughts verbally, with one word leading …
I read a wonderful post, Ancient Maps are Mirrors for the Ancient Psyche, by Amelia Soth on the JSTOR Daily blog. It was about maps from the Middle Ages and how they reflect the beliefs and superstitions of the people that made and used them at the time. Many things that we now take …
This essay talks about the variety of dischordant voices clamoring for attention, in the world of disability advocacy, and how we are more likely to effectuate change, if we sing together. Thanks for coming by to read! Autism blogs abound. I had no idea how many there were, until I used “autism” as a …
I think we have had enough of hurricanes. Hurricane Harvey. Hurricane Irma. Hurricane Jose. And Katia, who lived for a short time in the Gulf of Mexico before the Mexican Earthquake upstaged her. When I wrote my last post, I didn’t seriously think that another tropical event could rival the intensity of damage that …
