New Parents
Congratulations on the new baby!
If you just found out that you are a new parent to someone with Down Syndrome, we want to help smooth your transition to your new (and wonderful) life. Here are a few resources that may help:
Diagnosis to Delivery: A Pregnant Mother's Guide to Down Syndrome
Welcoming a Newborn with Down Syndrome: A New Parent's Guide to the First Month
Understanding a Down Syndrome Diagnosis, Lettercase
Down Syndrome Pregnancy, Human Development Institute at the University of Kentucky
A New Parent Handbook, DSAA
A Promising Future Together, NDSS
Growth Chart
A CDC-funded study in Pediatrics provided new growth charts in 2015 for children with Down syndrome in the United States. Families and healthcare providers can use these new charts to monitor growth among children with Down syndrome and assess how well a child with Down syndrome is growing when compared to peers with Down syndrome. Click here to download the new charts.
We also think you might enjoy reading a letter from a mother of a beautiful daughter who happens to have Down syndrome:
WELCOME TO HOLLAND
by: Emily Perl Kingsley
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......
When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.
But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.
c1987 by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved.
Of course, you can reach out to us locally as well!
Click here to see our RESOURCES page.