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
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 …
Harvey, a Category 4 hurricane, plowed through Corpus Christi, Texas this past Friday. And reminded us all that hurricane season is upon us. The pictures and video, from Houston to Alabama, of the soggy path, where the remnants of the storm have lingered and dumped rain for the past week, horrify the soul. Images …
When your main occupation is schooling your children at home, sometimes it’s hard to decide what comes first. What should you concentrate your energies on? What is highest on the list, among so many things of great importance? When we first began homeschooling in 2010, it all seemed pretty clear to me. Just getting my …
Some of you may well be veterans of the special education system. By this, I mean parents whose children once had IEPs, but are now homeschooling. I am also such a veteran. And like you, I have battle scars. It is a relief, in a way, not to have to deal with the stress of …
{I first published this essay in August of 2017, in response to the Charlottesville debacle. At the risk of having this be perceived as little different than our President’s own comment, that “There are good people on both sides,” I tried at that time to convey my conflicted emotions on the subject of Confederate …
First Time Around Two years ago, my sons went to a First Lego League training class at the beginning of the school year. They showed varying degrees of interest: My younger, more scientific son, whose interests include programming and 3-D modeling now, was already starting to fiddle around with programming then. He very quickly took …
Every parent of a special needs child has been there. You know the moment. It’s when you realize that the therapy or activity you are considering, or the professional you have already hired, or the educational program you signed up for long ago, doesn’t quite live up to your expectations. When you know it’s time …
The other day I was going over my daughter’s college transcript so far. She is halfway through and getting ready to choose a major. The college has actually been pestering her to choose for over a year now. Ever since she was barely a sophomore. Probably because she passed the 60 credit-hour mark early, having …
