Nobody tells you this when you get the diagnosis, but an IEP meeting is a fight, and you are walking into the ring whether you feel ready or not. That is not me being dramatic. It is me being honest about what it actually feels like to sit across a table from a team of…
We want our kids to have all the same childhood things everyone else’s kids get, the water park day, the hotel pool, the family road trip. But wanting that and being able to hand it to them without a cost are two very different things. Change in routine is hard. Generalizing what a “vacation” even…
When you have more than one child with needs, people assume there’s always “the other one,” the sibling who doesn’t need extra appointments, extra meetings, extra everything. For years in our house, that was Caydence. While we were navigating surgeries and therapies for Carlos, and school trauma and meltdowns for Coah, Caydence was the dancer,…
Imagine finally getting the courage to ask for help. You’ve watched the signs pile up, had the hard conversations with your pediatrician, and you’re ready, really ready, to get your child evaluated. Then you’re told the wait is six months. Twelve months. In some places, eighteen. Not for treatment. Not for services. Just for the…
My dad has had a hand in raising our children alongside us. I could not do it all without him. They say it takes a village, and no truer words have ever been spoken. But not everyone is lucky enough to be so blessed with that kind of support, and not everyone in a Filipino…
Mommy is tired. Not the tired that sleep can fix, or a short vacation could cure, this is the tired that lives in the bones and settles into the soul. It’s the tired of fighting the world, and sometimes even fighting with the very child I’m fighting for, over chicken nuggets that aren’t the right…
Three kids, three completely different neurodivergent journeys, spanning elementary school all the way up through college, all under one roof at the same time. It’s bananas. Some days it feels like triage, standing in the middle of my own house trying to figure out who needs me first, because they’re all priorities, every single one…
We were always apprehensive about medication. With Carlos, our eldest, we didn’t choose to medicate until high school, when the subjects finally got complex enough that he needed the extra support to focus, remember, and process. But every special need journey is different, and with Coah, the conversation started at the young age of five….
You just got the diagnosis. Now what? Maybe you already suspected it, maybe it caught you completely off guard, but either way, here you are holding a piece of paper that changes everything. And then come the remarks. Your child does this more than that, “compared to other students in his or her class.” You…
I didn’t know what “special needs” meant until it became my whole world. Carlos was my first, my eldest, the baby who was supposed to teach me the basics: feeding schedules, sleepless nights, first steps. Instead he taught me things no parenting book prepares you for. When the diagnoses started coming in, one after another,…
