Picnic!

In any other child's photo album this would be just another photo - hardly worth commenting on. It's not even that great a shot of Noa. But for us, this photo marks an important moment. Believe it or not, this marks the FIRST TIME EVER that Ben and I, like so many other parents, sat on a bench at the playground and watched Noa play. Not only that, she's sharing the space with other kids who - while aware of her being different, and yes some kids sort of avoided sitting with her - treated her essentially like any other kid on the playground.

Where did this wonderful thing happen? Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, Long Island, at their all-access playground that is designed for special needs kids and typically developing kids to play together. It's a great playground - and it really makes you wonder because its so creative and all the kids were loving it. Really every playground should be more like this - where everything you play with has a wealth of sensory information and opportunity. There were panels on the ground that you could jump on to ring bells, things that spun and rocked, everything you could climb had things to touch and turn along the way. If you check out this turnabout, you can see the bar that this kid is using to push it - it's actually a break that is built in for wheel chair riders (who can turn the thing using the giant piece in the middle like a sit n' spin) - but the break turns out to be a great tool. The older kids who liked to push it created a whole game of stopping with the break so littler kids could get on and off. It was pretty cool. Noa was on this thing of a loooooooong time and we really did have to bribe her off it with food... mainly because we were hungry!

The trip to this great park was actually motivated by a picnic for NYPN - the New York Parents Network of the NY Deaf-Blind Collaborative. We haven't gone to a lot of these, but are trying to get more engaged in this community. It's tough because a lot of the stuff - like this - is not in the City and we had to rent a car to make the trip (we could have taken the LIRR and then taken a taxi or called someone at the picnic to pick us up but to tell the truth public transportation can be a real challenge with a disabled child on an average day - not to mention a NYC weekend which is all about schedule changes and track work - even without all the picnic stuff!)

The group at the picnic was small since it seemed like it might rain but we met some lovely folks and it was well worth the trip for all of us. Most amazingly we met the mother of a 17 year old boy with CHARGE Syndrome who told us that her son didn't start eating solid food until he was 12!!! Not only that, when I asked her how they finally succeeded she told me it was through a feeding therapist in Westchester quite near Noa's school. Granted, the issues were in many ways different but just to know that they got there was really just what I needed to hear after the disappointment of learning that Noa's school had decided to discontinue was going to drop her feeding therapy.