MSI Press Blog

  Shane reads, really reads. He started reading at the age of 23 months. He was barely talking at the time, and he was not yet walking. I figured he was just a little slower getting around to things, but it turns out he had set a different priority to things. One day, I was working with Noelle with flashcards, using them to make sentences, trying to visually get her to understand how language works -- and reading is a big part of that. She struggled, and so I put the flashcards away and said we would try again in a few months.  Shane crawled over and said, "Read." It was his first word after he uttered "oh-oh" when he broke his arm at 6 months in an unexpected tumble. Not Mama, not Dada. But "read." I told him sure, when he got a little bigger, we could play with the flashcards.  "Read now," he responded. Wow, he knew another word! But he had never said any of the words on the flashcards. I laid them out for him; there were a dozen. Mommy, Daddy,...

  When we were living in Pittsburgh, a little orange kitten showed up one day and quickly became pals with Shane, who named him Puff. He was an indoor–outdoor cat, always turning up for his meals and for petting, as if he knew he belonged. When we moved to Arlington, Virginia, we took Puff with us—how could we leave him behind? He adapted easily to the new neighborhood, a quiet area tucked away from traffic and noise. Good for kids. Good for a cat. For a while, everything felt right. Then, about a year later, Puff stopped wanting to go outside. He curled up in the corner of the study and slept—and slept—and slept. We worried. Was he sick? Had he eaten something bad? We took him to the vet on Monday morning, hoping for medicine or a change of food. The diagnosis was devastating: feline leukemia, likely contracted from other outdoor cats in Virginia. In Pittsburgh, our neighborhood had been so isolated that cats roamed freely and safely—something that’s rare now. But in Arlington, FL...

  Shane was always bored at school, even after skipping four grades. He began first grade six weeks after turning three. We had tried to place him in preschool, but on the very first day the director met me at the door and said, “A child who can read full books, add, subtract, multiply, divide, and work with fractions does not belong in preschool.” The university lab school agreed and moved him directly into first grade. His only complaint was that he couldn’t reach the doorknob to get into the building by himself. The next seven years were marked by a steady pattern of running away from school because he was so bored. When Arlington Public Schools in Virginia tested him at age seven (he was in fourth grade at the time), they found his math skills were at the pre‑calculus level, and the books he preferred were the ones college students struggled with. He especially liked Faulkner. Teachers had no idea what to do with him, and unsurprisingly, he was not fond of school. He preferred ...

When the kids were little, we drove from Pittsburgh to Daytona Beach, Florida, to visit Donnie’s grandmother after Grandpa died. We spent some lovely days on the beach. Lizzie and Shane ran straight into the surf like they had been born with gills. Noelle, determined as always, figured out how to wade with her braces and crutches. (When we got home, we had to explain to the bracemaker how the ocean had “mysteriously” demolished them. He was not amused. Noelle was.) Doah, only a couple of years old, couldn’t run with the others. He still had his tracheotomy, so he and I sat in the sand building castles while Donnie supervised the older kids. It was one of the rare moments in those years when I felt relaxed — truly relaxed — because most of our time was spent in hospitals, clinics, or managing medical equipment at home. Sitting there with him, letting the sun warm us, I allowed myself to believe that everything was under control. And then the ocean reminded me that nothing is ever under ...