That "crackles everywhere" meant our son had something called RSV, a temperature of 92 degrees and life-threatening pneumonia in both lungs.
After researching the idea, we discovered that many colleges actually encourage prospective freshmen to consider a gap year, which meant our son's university-of-choice quickly agreed to defer enrollment.
When our infant would make the sound "mama," we would quickly and (half) jokingly correct him, "No... it's 'O-bama!'" Wasn't there a way we could keep him from ever learning "the M word?" He came to us through an open adoption, which meant our son would be raised knowing who his birthmother was.
There's the first-thing-in-the-morning approach, but as much as I would love to get up at dawn, I am crushed to have to say that my husband leaves for work at 5 a.m., which means our young sons would be home alone if I left for the gym, a situation frowned upon by the bureau of child welfare.
According to a text released here by the Soviet Jewry Information Center, he protested above all that Dima's refusal "means that our son and his family have been deprived of the future for the sake of which alone we live". "I love my son and cannot agree that he is doomed to lose his best years because that is convenient for one or another bureaucratic department," Alec added.
The other, Cleopatra De Leon and Nicole Dimetman, who married in Massachusetts and have a young son, said in a statement: "Ultimately, the repeal of Texas's ban will mean that our son will never know how this denial of equal protections demeaned our family and belittled his parents' relationship.
It means expecting our sons to be emotionally competent, generous and sensitive to how their actions impact the people around them.
For now, we watch the news and struggle to find the right words to explain what it all means to our sons and to ourselves.
Yet during this time his father and I were pulling our hair out, calling frequent meetings with his teachers and the administration at his school, and struggling to find any means to help our son who grew increasingly frustrated by his inability to perform in the way the school demanded.
It was the first book that meant as much to our son as it did to us, and in many ways we all chose to adopt its mythology as our family's mythology.
