Tag: lowmuscletone

This girl can

There are two magical moments that I did not capture with a photo this holiday that shows that this girl really can.

There are plenty of moments that we don’t capture, that people don’t see but which are part of family life with Trudy.

We were recently on holiday in Balmedie, north of Aberdeen. Fifteen miles of beach which the poodle loved, and Patrick and Trudy returned to their roots to explore the sea and the sand, having grown up by the beach. Trudy ran and didn’t stop running, splashing in the waves and squeezing the wet sand between her fingers whilst our baby squirmed at the alien feeling of sand in her toes.

I’ve never seen her run so well, with solid ankles that took so long to straighten and required special boots for support, with straight legs that have become stronger and less hypotonic. She was in her element, literally.

But the moment that trumped all moments and shows how far she has come is when she tobogganed down the dunes. Yes, I said toboggan. We came across some children who were having a party in the dunes. Alex spoke to one of the dads who explained why they all had toboggans, and incidentally why there was one outside our holiday cottage. They were heading to the dunes to slide down them.

My heart was in my mouth as she ran across to the steepest dune, a good 20 metres off the ground and with a 85% gradient down to a puddle in the basin. We all stopped the consider the height, the steepness with our brains which fear and calculate risk so efficiently but stop us from ever doing anything. Trudy, all impulse, launched herself at the bottom of the dune and began to scale the heights. She scrambled against the sand until she got to the top. Meanwhile, we all started thinking she wouldnt get there, that it was impossible for a 6 year old with Down’s Syndrome to manage that. But when she did, Patrick ran up after her, Alex in tow to help her. Did she need help? Not in the slightest. She stood at the top, she managed the risk, watched her brother have a go then slid down on her bottom. Squeals of delight echoed across the dunes. She had achieved so much right then and she didn’t even need us to praise it. She was just glad she’d done what everyone else was doing

This is why this girl can, why so many underestimated young people can despite the assumptions we make based on their perceived ability. The desire to be part of a group can be strong motivation indeed to overcome the greatest of challenges.

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What is disabling our daughter?

It is a powerful word, ‘disabling’. By its own definition, it would mean that someone who is ‘disabled’ lacks the ability to do anything. That is quite a frightening prospect for anyone.

But it is the process of ‘disabling’ which really interests me. Someone or something must have been the source of the disability. Is it the condition itself that forces the person in a wheelchair, or the rampless bus which the person can’t board, or is it the people who stare at the limbless man, the almond eyes, the slurred speech? What or who is disabling?

Our daughter, Trudy, had low muscle tone when she was younger, a condition associated with that extra chromosome which keeps rearing its ugly head. She couldn’t sit in standard wooden high chairs (popular in restaurants and pubs) without sliding through it like jelly and there was no chance we were going to feed her safely. So, we had to phone ahead to make sure that they had a plastic high chair with a cushioned insert and a bar between the legs. These were specific requests but, if they didn’t have one, we couldn’t go.

Trudy wanted to start gymnastics but we had to get a letter from her paediatrician to say that it was safe for her (appointments with paediatricians are not easy to get). She wanted to do dance classes but she had to wear tap shoes. Has anyone tried to get a hypotonic ankle into a tap shoe?! We started swimming lessons but the instructor said that we couldn’t go in with her because she was in the higher age group. I stated quite politely that she would drown if we didn’t go in with her. Needless to say, he let me in then. And then there’s childcare. We can’t just send Trudy to a holiday camp or a babysitter without having an in-depth conversation first in which we dissect and analyse Trudy’s needs.

Some of these things have to be in place to make sure our daughter is safe, like the paediatrician’s letter and the pre-activity chats. But the smart-looking high chair that doesn’t support the baby or indeed the backless swing at the park lead us to a swift conclusion: We can’t go out.

We can’t go to the playground because our child will just have to sit there watching the other children play, and that’s not fair. Have you ever wondered why there are few disabled people in parks? Lack of accessible equipment is a major factor.

We can’t go to the cafe because they don’t have the right equipment to feed our child safely.

We can’t go to that concert because our children can’t queue or stand the noise.

Or very sadly, we can’t go out because they’ll stare.

So, what is disabling our daughter? Well, it’s a combination of things. Her Down’s Syndrome prevents her from understanding, which means basic excursions are a challenge. The wrong equipment or the crowded places are an issue. But for the people who stare, who don’t understand that she is finding it difficult to wait or really doesn’t want to move, well, they’ve really no excuse in my opinion.

A person feels disabled when they can’t access the most basic of places such as the bus or the shops. So the buses have ramps and the shops have wheelchair-friendly trolleys, but not always. Blue badge users can park closer to shops but, who hasn’t been guilty of parking in a disabled spot when in a hurry?

A person feels disabled when there are too many barriers to doing what they want to do, like dance or gymnastics or swimming. Parents give up because there are just too many forms to fill in and nobody seems to read them anyway.

A person feels disabled when normal avenues are not available to them such as mainstream education or employment. Children are turned away from schools because they will be ‘detrimental to other children’*. Adults can’t get jobs because it requires just too much effort to adapt the workplace for a wheelchair user or a person with learning difficulties.

There is some great work out there and some great legislation around disability rights but, perhaps if we started considering the possibility that people are not ‘disabled’ but ‘enabled’, we might not assume what they can’t achieve and start concentrating on what they can.

*Standards in Scottish Schools Act, 2000

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How a typical child develops (from observation, experience and a little background knowledge!)

Watching a typical child develop is a bittersweet reminder of how Trudy’s development differed and differs.

Trudy and Patrick now have a little sister, a lockdown baby who has never seen anyone except her immediate family and grandparents, and knows her buggy much better than her car seat!

I watch her develop every day, learning to gain command of her limbs, the cogs in her typical brain turning to bang and hit and grasp her toys. She moves her body to discover what she can and can’t do, and what she still needs to learn.

It reminds me of Trudy’s first years, a floppy, hypotonic baby whose brain struggled to process everything at the same time. She would babble away (because Trudy loves to chat), but her physical development would stall.

She sat up on her own at 1, stood up independently at 2 and a half and walked at 3. Trudy is 5 now and she’s running.

Her baby sister will probably crawl before she’s 1 and be walking before 2.

And this is not that large a gap compared to some children but it reminds us of the difference between the way Trudy learns and how she will never follow a typical development pattern.

Trudy’s sister will learn through osmosis, through a combination of watching and learning, her innate faculties processing every little thing subconsciously then acting upon them with conscious and deliberate movement. She bangs herself on the head with a toy, she does it a second time and then doesn’t do it again.

A typical brain will absorb the concept of consequences much more easily than a child with learning difficulties, even if the child hasn’t experienced the consequence, so that the typical child will not wander far from home or run across a car park.

Most consequences we talk about are largely linguistic in that respect, “don’t climb too high or you’ll fall”, “don’t run across the road or you’ll get run over”, “don’t put your fingers in the fire or you’ll get burnt”. You say something like that to Trudy and all she hears is “put your fingers in the fire”!

Trudy will always need support to understand what she should and shouldn’t do, but with the right use of language, she can begin to process the world on a subconscious level, to inherently learn to be safe and independent of us.

There is research happening all the time on how to develop our young people’s independent living skills and ultimately make them less vulnerable. To make them safe, healthy and happy: Such simple aims to which we all have a right, and it should never be forgotten that some of us have the natural privilege to be.

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It’s not a race

After having a child who has learned everything so quickly, it was very strange to then have Trudy. I was used to having no worries about whether my child would meet his milestones. With Trudy, I am always worried about when she will get to the next one. I call them my Hare and my Tortoise, and I truly believe that slow and steady will win in the end.

Patrick learns things so fast and will work at something until he has mastered it, but then he moves onto the next thing. Trudy does not have that luxury – she needs time. I have never seen so much patience and perseverance in someone striving to get up a slide or master the stairs. She observes, she tries, then she tries again. Sometimes, her body can’t do it but she parks it until she is ready. The majority of us have the advantage of relying on our bodies to do what we want them to do. Trudy’s body always seems to be lagging behind. I wanted to get her a t-shirt that said, “doing the best with the body I have”. I think that would probably be true for a lot of us. So, it is remarkable when I hear stories of people with Down’s Syndrome swimming the English Channel (please look up Karen Gaffney) and competing in gymnastics in the Special Olympics (look up Scotland’s own Andrew MacIntyre), to name but a few.  Karen Gaffney said that “life prepared her for her swim”, that the defeats she had experienced in her life gave her the strength to complete the race. Trudy was not learning how to get up a slide, but to keep on trying. She was learning resilience, she was working out how to do things in a different way – she was learning to problem solve. It is high time we started to focus on and celebrate these so-called ‘soft skills’.

We do so much, so fast, like we want life to pass us by. We are always in a hurry to get to work, to get to school, to get to the next appointment, when we need to spend more time in the moment. Our daughter has taught us that, not to worry about the future and her future, but to enjoy having her and her brother now, fit and healthy and happy. And, after all, that’s what counts.

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