Busy as a honey Bee

I know there has been an absence and i should of checked in here. Some of you were concerned and i apologize for that. My absence is nothing more than the fact that i have been busy as a honey bee. My Little Rozie shop is busy as can be right before Yom Tov, and i have been filling orders and creating new items.

I have been shopping and preparing for Yom Tov. We have been enjoying local fall carnivals, and I have been planning Yom Tov meals. I even started getting creative with Dovie's lunches this year to get him out of the tan food diet.



I had my first photography session with a family. I never planned on going very far with my photography but they asked and i said yes. It was very exciting.

I was looking back at some of my posts from last year this time here, and all i can do is thank Hashem.

I am so busy and full of energy that i dont even have time to sit down to do a blog post. I am so thankful to be busy and to have the energy to do it all. Okay maybe not all but at least a lot.
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If you would like to order a little Rozie bow or flower just like Rozie wears please go the facebook page here and take a look. I am filling a bunch of orders this weekend and sending out on Monday morning. So if you would like to order before Yom Tov please contact me at myshtub@gmail.com or on the facebook page. Thanks and Good Shabbos

The Acceptance of Love..Part Three

To generalize is human nature. We are constantly making assumptions and categorizing the people around us, trying to figure out where we all fit in. This is what we do, and often without thinking about it.

When it comes to having a child with special needs the generalizations start from day one. Your child is diagnosed with "A" so he will most likely be able to do A B and C but probably not D and E.

I hear generalizations so often that i start to wonder how words like, lazy, over eater, heart condition, low functioning, high functioning, tongue thrust, mental retardation, slow, low tone, happy, social, overweight and on and on, do not not just eat me alive. Seriously i wonder how it is that these words do not all just form together to create this huge generalization monster and eat me up. I feel like these statements, these generalizations wear me down and sit on my shoulders all day. What is so hard about them is they have medical and scientific evidence to back them up, well some of them do. Then these generalizations become statistics and then it is ok to generalize about your child because there is statistic to back it up. This is basic science, right? Could you imagine if this was your baby. Lets pretend that the medical world has made a new discovery that children with brown hair and blue eyes are more aggressive. So you have just given birth to a beautiful baby boy and the doctor walks over to you and says " your son is beautiful, but i need you to know that it looks like he may have brown hair and blue eyes,here is some pamphlets on aggression and a social worker will be in shortly to speak with you". You look down at your little one and you can't see the striking beauty of the brown hair and blue eyes anymore , you can't swim in the pools of blue looking up at you, all you can do is worry. How will he go to school, what about college, will he ever marry? Your moment was taken away, all because of a generalization.You cant look at his blue eyes and brown hair an not associate it with his future, and to top it off everyone else will see his physical appearance and associate it with aggression. Welcome to this world little one you are now a statistic.
Hashem has created this world with a fine brush. His creativity is beyond our greatest imagination. Each being fits into our world as an individual. We look at little ones like my Rozie and see her beautifully slanted eyes and generalize. It is what we do it is human nature.

Rozie has gotten to the age where she will no longer sit in the grocery cart seat. She can wiggle out of the strap and stand up in the seat, and usually this happens when i turn to grab a bag of lettuce or a bottle of milk. To fix this is started putting her in the large part of the basket, i feel she is safer there because she can stand all she wants and and she is not taller then the basket. Rozie loves this, and stands in the cart and waves. She says "hi" with her husky little voice and waves her pageant hand at every shopper in the store. The girl thinks she is on a float and loves every minute of it. I was also loving it , she was in her social element , until she was generalized. "They are all like that, so happy", someone said to me in a sweet voice. It was meant to be a compliment pointing out how lucky i am to have one of those Down syndrome kids that are "always happy", but to me it was hurtful. It took something so wonderful from my daughter and turned it into a symptom of her syndrome. She wasn't a little girl who loved to wave. She wasn't and individual and her behavior wasn't unique to her. It was her extra chromosome that caused this behavior. I wanted her to sit down.

Statistics and generalizations are important , i understand that. We need them to understand Rozie's makeup and how things will work for her, medically, physically and mentally, but when these statistics take away her, then i'm no longer listening.
Generalization will always be part of our lives. Sometimes she will fit the mold,and often she wont. My job is to walk away from them and to accept her even if she overeats, or is delayed in her speech.
Rozie is a piece of Hashem's fine art so perfectly designed. She waves and smiles and wins the heart of the people around her, but not because she has Down syndrome, but because she is a sweet little girl that loves to love. She is my Rozie first and Down syndrome second, she is not her diagnosis and her diagnosis is not her.
I love you my sweet Rozie from the moon and back a million billion trillion times over

Dancing into Shabbos

Rozie is dancing because she knows its almost Shabbos. Good Shabbos to everyone!

The Acceptance of love...Part two

"Is your daughter high functioning"? I just jokingly once want to answer no , just to see the reaction. This funny statement has never been part of my vocabulary until i had Rozie.

When i had my boys i didn't look at them and say please Hashem let them be high functioning. The assumption was just there , but why wasn't the assumption there with my Rozie, why am i always being asked?

When i first had her i was obsessed with this high functioning title, when people would comment that she looks high functioning i would beam with pride. I am one of the lucky ones, i thought, my daughter will be high functioning. It was kind of funny if you think about it. She was this tiny bundle of a newborn looking a little scrunched and usually asleep. People would look over at my sleeping princess and comment on her future functioning ability, and i would smile with my silly pride. I don't know what people or i was thinking , its not like she was taking aptitude tests and holding adult like conversations , she was a little sack of potatoes sleeping like most newborns ( maybe a little more), but at that time i took it where i could get it.

Now that Rozie is older the functioning comment is no longer my source of pride. My pride is in her and that fact that she is my daughter, not in her performance levels. I don't need my daughter to perform at a level that society deems high functioning to feel pride in her. Yet the question is still there. Will she function at a high level? The answer is simple... I don't know.
This is the same for any child, we can not a guarantee that a child will function at a level we find appropriate no matter what their diagnosis is or is not. I have witnessed this personally with my oldest son.

I think the functioning question also is interesting because who makes the rules, and is there a function check list? I think this is not a realistic because so many factors affect what a person may consider to be a high functioning adult. In my community marriage is the top of the list, not necessarily college, but to a high power corporate mom a daughter who doesn't go to college and gets married at twenty probably isn't on her high functioning list. Things like culture, finances, religion, education, and environment, all make a difference to what a community accepts as a proper functioning level.

So what is my point? My point is that to label my daughter is not important to me, because what i may find to be wonderful and the top of the charts may be the bottom for someone else. You can't win and its a lot of wasted energy. Accepting your child and adult for whoever they are and whatever level they perform at is the only winning answer.

When people ask me now "Is Rozie high functioning" my answer is always "yes she is, and no matter what she is able to do,and not able to do, she will always be high functioning"
We love you little Rozie, Dovie, and Mel from the moon and back a million billion trillion times over.


(BTW all these pics were taken at our new favorite place, Gunpowder Falls Beach)