Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Nothing Bundt Cakes will donate 20 percent of its proceeds to the Sensory Garden Playground project to help bring an inclusive playground with features designed for children with special needs.
Newly opened Nothing Bundt Cakes this weekend is celebrating their grand opening by donating 20 percent of their sales to the Sensory Garden Playground, a project in the fundraising stage for an inclusive playground with features designed for children with special needs. Nothing Bundt Cakes opened earlier this month at 421 Town Square Wheaton, and will celebrate its grand opening Friday, April 12 and Saturday, April 13. Representatives from the Sensory Garden Playground, which will be built at Warrenville Rd. and Naper Blvd. in Lisle, will be on hand 4 to 6 p.m. Friday and 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday to answer questions about the project, according to a news release from the Western DuPage Special Recreation Association (WDSRA). Information…
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Connection of Friends, a new organization in Wheaton offers programming for teens and young adults with special needs as they age out of the school system.
When a student with special needs turns 21, their days are numbered until they are no longer eligible to go to school. While most parents toast to their son or daughter's first legal drink, parents of a young adult with special needs are planning for what happens on their 22nd birthday. Like many parents who have been planning since their child was in elementary school, Sarah Donnelly, a mother of two children of autism voiced concern for where her daughter would go at 22, before she was even a teenager. Sharing Donnelly's concern, her parents Terry and Ginny Kline researched programs and options for adults with special needs. In September 2012, they opened Connection of Friends a 501c3 organization that provides a place for social …
41.839322
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Hope Presbyterian Church
1771 S Wiesbrook Rd, Wheaton, IL
/articles/connection-of-friends-wheaton-il-teens-young-adults-with-special-needs-can-continue-life-social-skills
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Tuesday, May 29, 2012
How I learned the hard way to put a protective password on all of my electronic devices.
Chiot, puppy, murphy, Zhu Zhu, giochi preziosi, chien, dog. That’s what the eBay invoice said that appeared in my inbox from out of nowhere. I engage in quite of bit commerce on eBay, but almost exclusively as a seller of wares. I’m not used to getting invoiced. Must be a mistake, I thought. Until I opened the email, and then I knew exactly what had happened. My daughter had made a purchase on eBay. She’d gone and helped herself to a fluffy-eared little minx of a Zhu Zhu puppy named Murphy. From France. For 30 Euro. That’s like $10,000 right? As I’ve written about previously, I am the anti-hoarder. I have the constant urge to purge and, as such, always have something posted on both eBay and Craigslist at any given time. So naturally I am…
Thursday, May 24, 2012
District 200 staff will reach out to the community for input on two options for a new Jefferson Preschool Early Childhood Education Center in Wheaton.
Residents will have an opportunity to weigh in on proposals to rebuild the outdated Jefferson Preschool facility at 130 N. Halzelton Avenue in Wheaton. Community Unit School District 200 staff, board members and representatives from Legat Architects discussed two $29 million options to rebuild Jefferson, the district's School Services Center (SSC) and rehab, or sell, Woodland School, a district storage facility in Warrenville at a board meeting Wednesday night. Sign up for the free Wheaton Patch newsletter! Legat representative Patrick Brosnan presented the following options to the board: Brosnan introduced early plans to the board in October, and has worked with a board subcommittee and district staff to develop plans for the project. A …
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
The only people responsible for perpetuating “The Mommy Wars” are mommies themselves.
I’m sure by now that most of you have seen Time magazine’s latest cover story, with its provocative photo of a nubile young MILF breastfeeding her nearly 4-year-old son alongside the headline, “Are You Mom Enough?” The photo and accompanying article have bloggers and pundits everywhere lamenting over this re-ignition of The Mommy Wars, in which mommies are pitted against one another based on differing parenting philosophies, breastfeeding habits, working versus staying at home, etc. But in my experience, the only people responsible for perpetuating The Mommy Wars are mommies, themselves. One of the singularly most miserable experiences of my life was when I decided to join a new mothers’ group shortly after my daughter was born. I was …
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
The happiest place on earth turned terrifying when I lost track of my kid.
My daughter likes to run around. Back and forth. Forth and back. In circles. Arms flailing. Hoppity hopping. She will impulsively run towards water in any form, with fountains being a favorite. You know that dog in the movie Up who completely loses track of his mission when anyone so much as says the word “squirrel”? That’s my daughter. Fountain! Pond! Waterfall! Sprinkler! You know where there are lots of fountains? Disneyworld. Where we just returned from after a mostly blissful week spent in their fine parks. You know what there is also a lot of at Disneyworld? People. Swarms and swarms of people that get in-between me and my kid when she darts off. Memo to the world: It does not count as “cutting” when I try to get around you and your …
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
But am I counting the days in anticipation or just marking time until my eventual demise?
When I first entered the workforce, back in ye olde 1980s, the Interwebs did not exist. There was no Facebook or Twitter, no online shopping or eBay, no TMZ or People.com. I’m not sure that we screwed around any less at work than people do today, so I won’t go off into one of those “in my day…” rants. We were just limited to killing time with actual, rather than virtual, people and activities. If I wanted to gossip about people behind their backs, I had to do it with co-workers. Or call my friends who were also in dead-end entry level jobs. You just had to keep your eye on the opening-to-your-cubicle-which-cannot-really-be-called-a-door in case the boss happened by so you could bust out some officious-sounding convo, which was the '80s …
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Explaining death to a child is never easy, but especially fraught for parents of children with autism.
Last fall I wrote about parenting advice columns and how foreign and inapplicable the content was for special needs parents. But even when advice is supposedly specifically tailored to parents of children with autism, it can be laughably off-base. Take this article about explaining the death of a loved one to a child with autism. This one hit close to home because my father died about a year and a half ago. Also just recently my daughter’s BFF Grace, who is also on the autism spectrum, experienced death for the first time. In her case, it was her elderly neighbor Harry whom she barely had any contact with except for when he chased her away from his bird bath. But that didn’t stop her from becoming completely obsessed with his sudden …
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Finally, one of my autistic daughter’s fixations has morphed into something constructive.
High on the list of autistic traits are “narrow interests,” which can range from the fairly benign, like a nerdlinger obsession with American presidents and dinosaurs, to the mildly annoying, like Thomas the Tank Engine, to the more, shall we say, impactful, like dismantling toilets. There is virtually no obsession too esoteric that it cannot be indulged today via the Internet, specifically sites like YouTube. We have many little friends that are into elevators, and you would be amazed at how many videos can be found of random people riding elevators … and helpfully telling you details about them. Suffice to say that if I ever find myself at the Tanglewood Mall in Roanoke, VA, I will never have to wonder if their JC Penney has a Dover …
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Two weeks of unstructured free time can be an autistic kid's worst nightmare. Not to mention their parents'.
Although the weather doesn’t seem to indicate it, we are smack in the middle of the winter school break. School children everywhere get two to three weeks off to…I don’t know, what are they doing? Playing with their Christmas toys? Nah, that was over about five minutes after they opened them. They sure aren’t tobogganing or building snowmen, at least not in this part of the country. I guess the only certainty is that they are all enjoying not being in school. But not so much for most children with autism. See, autistic kids love nothing more than their routine, and winter break leaves them all kinds of out-of-sorts. Two weeks of unstructured time off without the benefit of their usual, predictable schedules can be their worst nightmare…as…
Sandy Lang
9:46 pm on Thursday, April 11, 2013
What a great fundraiser! And the cakes are sooooo good! It's a win win for everyone! more ›