Around here, we’ve welcomed the new year…

Around here, it snowed…my very favorite cozy kind of weather.

Around here, the semester just ended, which meant two teenagers converted our living room into a library while they studied for finals.

(and it also meant a yummy dinner at our favorite Mexican place to celebrate their hard work! We always do this BEFORE grades come out, because hard work is its own reward…) And yes…I know the poinsettia is dead. Give me a break. My gifting does NOT include horticulture.

Around here, we celebrated Aunt Catherine’s life at her funeral last Saturday. Her influence shaped my own motherhood tremendously. She raised a child with disabilities during an era when no services were provided by the school…and she did it with acceptance, resolve, patience, and a great dose of humor.

Around here, we’re relaxing on Martin Luther King Day. My sister and I have already talked on the phone, remembering the year my dad made us write a report about Dr. King that we had to present at dinner time; he felt we didn’t have a good grasp on the influence of this great man.

Here is an excerpt from a speech Dr. King made at a school just six months before his death:

And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill. Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star.

For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.

Around here, we’re thinking about these great words.

~Katie

Stay tuned for…Communicating about kids with disabilities in the age of social media.