William and I were watching Bambi together last week. Penny was already asleep. Near the end, when spring comes, all the little animals fall in love. Owl calls them "twitterpated." William was very confused.

"Well, it's kind of like they become super-great friends. Like your dad and I are super-great ...

I have a brief interview with author Rachel Simon in this month's Books and Culture magazine: "Two Minutes With Rachel Simon." She wrote Riding the Bus With my Sister and The Story of Beautiful Girl. You need to subscribe to Books and Culture to read the whole thing (and I highly recommend subscribing–it's ...

My new memoir, A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny is out in stores now. I've been rereading it myself and revisiting many of the themes in the book. In the beginning of each chapter of the book, I share an excerpt from the journal I kept at the time all this ...

I just read a post by the author Ian Brown, "The Absence of Normal Frees Us" about Brown and his son, Walker. Brown's book, The Boy in the Moon, describes their relationship in greater detail, but this essay alone is well worth reading, and perhaps a good place to start thinking with Brown about the ...

I've written here on a number of occasions about my hopes (and fears) for Penny when it comes to making friends. I try to arrange playdates. I talk to her teachers about her social skills. We practice "using her words" and looking people in the eye. We bemoan how often she just wants to crawl into an ...

Lots more information to come as the week progresses, including an excerpt and a video clip. But for today–you can order your copy of A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith Expectations and a Little Girl Named Penny. Please spread the word on Facebook and Twitter, through email and good old fashioned word of ...

Siddharta Mukherjee wrote a column for the New York Times Magazine about his experience watching funeral pyres in India as a boy, his experience as an oncologist watching Americans die of cancer, and the problems with the American way of death. The contrast between a body in flames as it passes from ...

Our daughter Penny was born five and a half years ago. She was our first child, and we found out two hours after she was born that she probably had an extra 21st chromosome. For us, the first twenty-four hours were the hardest, although it took me about a year to fully receive her for who she was, without ...

I wrote last week about a disturbing article in The New York Times Magazine that related stories of women who chose to "reduce" their pregnancies from twins to singletons. From my vantage point, the article raises two sets of ethical questions–one surrounding the ethics of abortion and so-called pregnancy ...

I hope to take the time to write more about this in the next few days, but for now I simply want to draw your attention to an article from the New York Times magazine about "pregnancy reductions." The article (The Two Minus One Pregnancy) describes the increasingly popular decision to "reduce" an unexpected ...

Jenni Newbury is a new friend of mine. She wrote a guest post a while ago about her younger brother Jason, who has Down syndrome, and she recently sent me the text of her keynote address from this year's National Down Syndrome Congress Convention. As she relates, if you are a sibling of someone with ...

It's been in the works for oh, five and a half years now, if you count the journal entries I wrote as soon as Penny was born. Those journal entries provided an outline for A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny. And then the outline became a book proposal became ...

So here's the question: should a man who was born without the lower half of his legs be allowed to compete in the World Track and Field Championships?

According to Juliet Macur of the New York Times ("As Debate Goes On, Amputee Will Break Barrier") some people think Oscar Pistorius has an advantage because ...

In the early stages of this blog, I wrote a post about in vitro fertilization. I essentially wondered out loud why people would attempt IVF given the fact that there are babies "out there" in needs of homes. I basically asked, "Why don't you just adopt?" In the years since I ...

Dan Hurley's article, "A Drug for Down Syndrome," appeared in The New York Times' Sunday Magazine yesterday. It describes the research efforts of Dr. Alberto Costa, father of a daughter with Down syndrome, who is seeking to improve cognition for individuals with Down syndrome. The article was fair and ...

I had this moment when we were on vacation in Virginia Beach. I was looking at Penny, and I wondered what other people thought when they saw her from a distance. I assume they saw a little girl playing in the sand with her family. And I assume if they got closer, they would see that her eyes look a ...

When I interviewed Rachel Simon, author of The Story of Beautiful Girl a few weeks back, I asked her some of your questions. I've finally transcribed the interview and wanted to share with you her thoughts.

What are some ways growing up with a sister with an intellectual disability changed and shaped ...

Over the weekend, a friend asked, "What was the hardest part of writing A Good and Perfect Gift?"

When I sat down to write, I had over 200 typed pages of journal entries from the time immediately following Penny's birth. I recorded the raw emotions, the theological questions, and all the things I needed ...

Sometimes I forget that most of the world isn't attuned to issues related to Down syndrome and intellectual disability. I also get tired when I read one more headline about people in positions of power mocking people who have historically been scorned and abused. So when I read the reports about GQ's ...

I know the book is finished when the final deadline rolls around. Which, in this case, is TODAY!

My first deadline for A Good and Perfect Gift was last December. I spent the week after Christmas reading the entire manuscript out loud, listening for words that were repeated too often, sentences whose ...