Hello and welcome to my blog about special needs parenting. My hope is that this will be informative and helpful to you all, as I know it will be to me as I research and discuss each topic. I plan on going over many different subjects, from attachment to schooling. I am very excited to start this venture and I know it will be rewarding.
A little about me
My name is Nichole True; I am a full time mom and part time retail associate. In September of 2006 my husband and I brought our first child home from Guatemala.
Our daughter, Mia, has been diagnosed with optic nerve hypoplasia (ONH), nystagmus, and strabismus, and is legally blind. If you would like to see pictures and know more about Mia specifically you are welcome to visit my family blog here.
I know you are all probably wondering how that makes me qualified to discuss special needs parenting, after all I have only been a parent for 2 months. Well throughout the process of adopting our daughter I did a lot of research and learned a lot of things, one of them being that not much about special needs parenting, specifically parenting a blind child, is out there. It was frustrating yet I have grown a passion to inform others about special needs parenting and adoption.
I will not be discussing adoption at families.com but specifically special needs parenting. Throughout my short adult life I have had many jobs, but my longest, best, and most rewarding job was working for the city school district as a para-educator. I worked in the special education department, first as a classroom Para, where I helped all children in the our special education room with varying diagnosis from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to ODD (oppositional defiance disorder). Then later I became a one on one Para-educator for a kindergartner with cerebral palsy. I love this child with all of my heart; I worked with him from the beginning of kindergarten until the end of 3rd grade when he just got too big for me to transfer numerous times a day. Let me tell you I was scared to death to have this child in my hands all day. But boy am I glad I did. I literally watched this child go from a child who barely talked, and when he did it was very quiet and very short sentences, to a child who could read, write with the help of assistive technology on the computer, read, and do math. He went from a child that if I stopped to ask a co-worker a question he would automatically stop and wait, he did not feel comfortable enough to be more than 5 feet from my side, to a child who would go and “play” soccer with the other kids his age at recess, and learned how to go ahead and beat me to the classroom, we even taught him to “knock” on the door using his chair and wait for someone to open the door. In this time I was amazed at how much the “regular” children loved him, to the point of arguing over who was going to help him that day, and how he was just a normal child with a few differences. He will forever hold a piece of my heart as well of anyone’s he ever meets.
Please be patient with me and please feel free to leave comments, questions, or if you have a topic you would like me to do some research on. I am sure that this will become a wonderful thing for everyone involved.