To Stella, With Love

I found this in my comments box this morning when I logged in to check for messages. I thought Stella deserved a post of her own, so one hand less notwithstanding, I am posting a reply for her. (One easy thing about posts- one can always cut and paste, heehee. )
Stella’s note reads:
hi, got [...]

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TOP TEN Reasons To Attend ASP Conference

Top Ten Reasons to Attend Autism Society Philippines’ 11th National Conference on Autism
10 — ASP’s 11th National Conference will be held at the SMX Convention Center within the SM Mall of Asia Complex, with post-conference workshops at the Sky Dome of SM North EDSA.  As we all know, these sister malls are the largest (SMNE) [...]

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World Autism Awareness Day

April 2 is World Autism Awareness Day and it could not have come soon enough.
In the last year alone, we have read and heard of cases of individuals with autism that have suffered injustices in the hands of a supposedly tolerant and accepting society. Cases such as the child “voted” out of kindergarten classroom, Survivor-style, [...]

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Gut Reaction

This is a column posted for herword.com last January 27, 2009.
Alphonse, his nanny, my husband, and I were watching cable television early Saturday evening. “Kung Fu Hustle,” dubbed in Filipino, was on, and for lack of anything else interesting to watch in that time block, my channel-surfing fingers finally settled on that movie.
I love “Kung [...]

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Walk With Angels

Considering the number of kilometers I’ve covered since I started my regimen of walking/running, I feel mighty prepared to tackle this year’s Autism Walk. Last year, I was huffing and puffing in the morning sun, flushed pink from running and taking pictures at the same time. I had to pause and catch my breath more [...]

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Affirmation of Respect

Before we are able to love anyone else, even our children, we must love ourselves. To love ourselves, we must believe that we are worthy of respect. Some days, it’ll be hard to believe even this, when we are overwhelmed and tired and dispossessed of all good humor. There’ll be days you will have to butt heads with others, [...]

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Affirmation: Making A Difference

Too often, we measure our children’s progress by the leaps and bounds he or she makes. We  like to measure things in big chunks of miles and kilometers, in grades surpassed in one leap, in medals accrued on Recognition Day. And yet, when we see our child’s milestones creep at a snail’s pace or when progress seems disappointingly slow, we often [...]

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Affirmation of Parenting

These days, the pressure to “perform” as a parent of any child can be overwhelming. Imagine this same pressure heaped upon parents of autistic individuals and magnified much more. Parenting has never been as hard and as complicated as we know today.
Throughout the unsettled questions and controversies raging in the autism community, it’s hard not to be [...]

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Affirmation of Expertise

It’s easy enough to be carried away by the differing opinions of experts. Coming from a vantage point of the medical profession, I learned early enough to accord respect and deference to learned individuals of magnified importance, education, and status. And this becomes many a parent’s dilemma: is their voice worthy enough to be heard? What is [...]

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See With New Eyes

This is Alphonse. All of 13 years old, he is a handsome young man who makes girls swoon with his movie star features.

He’s an active fellow. He likes to walk a lot, sometimes deep in thought, as if pondering on the problems of the world. Other times, he can’t contain himself and he gallops, arms [...]

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