Buddy Walk

Today Walter, Maybelle, and I took part in this year's Buddy Walk, an annual event sponsored by Down syndrome associations around the country. I found the event pretty uplifting, in great part because it was so normal and normalizing. For instance, early on in the afternoon, I saw a five or six year old boy with Down syndrome standing with another boy around his same age. While I was watching, the second boy kicked the first one. This interaction was reassuring to me because these were just two kids being kids--nobody was being super-careful with the boy who had Down syndrome. It was similarly reassuring later on when I saw a toddler with DS having a meltdown. People often tell us how sweet people with DS are, and while I believe this is true, I also want Maybelle to have a range of emotions--I don't think she's going to be a person whose whole approach to the world is "sweet." So I liked seeing a kid having a normal toddler tantrum after a very high-energy afternoon.

We saw lots of other normalizing stuff: a very little boy gleefully running headlong away from his dad, who was having to really hoof it to catch up with him. A girl and her dad riding bikes home from the event. A little boy riding on his dad's shoulders, clapping and laughing. A teenaged boy with funky skater hair and shorts. And perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise, but one of the nice surprises of the day for me was the fact that it wasn't easy picking out which folks had DS and which didn't--I would scan the crowd and try to identify kids, and I was often wrong.

Okay, this picture has nothing to do with the Buddy Walk, but I wanted to post it because tonight Maybelle is wearing one of my favorite outfits, which won't fit her that much longer.