Love Story

This documentary won Best Documentary Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and drew some praise from Robert DeNiro, apparently. It's called Monica & David and it's about two people with Down syndrome who fall in love and get married. It's going to premiere on HBO on October 14 at 7 p.m. (central time).

Catastrophe

We're reading E.B. White's "The Trumpet of the Swan" right now—one of my all-time childhood favorites. I vividly remember being nestled in with Mark and Mom in the pull-out part of the trundle bed, listening with delight to Louis's adventures.

Last night we got to the part where Sam Beaver takes Louis to first grade to learn how to spell on a chalk board. After Louis copies a "C" and then "C-A-T" with ease, Mrs. Hammerbotham decides to try a harder word, so she spells "catastrophe."

I thought I'd ask Megan if she knew what catastrophe meant.

Me: "Have you ever heard that word, Megan?"
Megan: "I think so."
Me: "Do you have a guess about what it means?"
Megan: (hesitating) Ummm...
Luke: (giggling) "I know something that's a catastrophe."
Me: "Oh yeah? What's that, buddy?"
Luke: "Our house is a catastrophe." (hysterical laughing)

Yep.

What do you see?

Sweet brothers, giggling at me.

Buttons

James loves cause and effect toys, especially ones that play music. While Tim and Karen and Amanda were staying at my parents' house, James would charge in through the garage door and barrel through the kitchen like a Heisman-candidate tailback—his end zone being Amanda's musical jungle toy in the living room.

To capitalize on this preference, we have a touch screen hooked up to our computer that we got through an assisstive technology grant. You can download games for it that encourage interactive play. His favorite up until now has been one that requires him to touch the screen to present part of a picture (like a bus), touch it again to complete the picture, and touch it a third time to make it move and play music. He can touch anywhere on the screen, and he'd gotten good and sort of fast-pounding the screen three times to get to the music and movement.

If you can see the video, you'll see that he learned a pretty cool variation on this today. You can also choose to have switches, so that instead of touching anywhere on the screen, he had to press a little "switch" image on the left hand corner to make a picture appear, then press another little switch image on the right hand corner to make it animate.

There are 21 images in the set; by the end of the first set, he had gone from needing hand over hand, to needing just a touch at his elbow, to needing a verbal prompt of "Look" from me so he'd see the switch, to no prompt at all. He did another two or three sets all by himself—I even left the room a couple of times while on the phone. Yay James!

Notice his little pointer in the video!