What is so wrong with being personal?

Twice recently I've started to comment over at 5 Minutes for Special Needs about an issue that directly affects me as a person instead of me as an SLP-in-training, and stopped. It has been interesting for me to step back and watch the stopping and starting, the half-typed sentence that is deleted and replaced with two sentences that are deleted again.
Part of it is that commenting would involve sharing information about my brother, which I don't know if he would appreciate. Talking about my experiences as a sibling is difficult without talking about the other person. And part of it is that I don't know how I feel about the issues in question. If/when I decide to have children, my future husband and I will have to choose whether to take a significant chance that our baby will be born with disabilities or to take steps to have a "normal" baby. More testing will have to be done before that day, and more research on what the other steps may be, but right now it's a big foggy unknown. The post on 5MFSN was a little scary; it talked about how testing embryos for various conditions could lead to people creating "designer children." I certainly do not want to contribute to the idea that you can pick bits of your baby that you like and throw out bits that you don't like, but...having a healthy baby would be nice too. I don't know. It's a really tough judgment call, and I'm not looking forward to it.
As for today...a shower, a craft show, and a few hours of work before the aforementioned future husband shows up for our weekend visit make up my agenda. I have a degree, a marriage, and a job to get through before we seriously consider children. Mayhap I shall find some sweet wee one whose parents could not take care of him/her, and they can be mine, and then I can just avoid the issue altogether. :)

Lovely

I'm not sure if there's a storyline going on in this dance, but it is certainly inspiring. Here is another dance that made me grin. Different styles, different countries, different music and costumes, but same talent and strength. I think it's easy to focus on the "dis" in "disability," but these people have yanked the spotlight right over to "ability!"

ETA: I forgot to add that YouTube commenters can be extremely rude and vulgar, as this webcomic points out, and with each video that I linked above having over 1 million views there are bound to be some jerks lurking in the comment section. Ya'll probably already know the nature of the beast that is YouTube, but I wanted to give a heads up just in case so people wouldn't think I agreed with/supported/paid attention to/read any of the comments there.

Breaks are Good Things

Instead of chaining myself to my desk this weekend, I went shopping with my family and went to a folk festival with Chester. We found the Irish band and I was SO HAPPY. And then Monday Chester and I went to a new trail and walked the dogs. My half-blind 11 year old Labrador energetically tried to drag me down a ravine. It was awesome.
Of course I did not get enough work done. I will never get enough work done, because there is always more work that I could/should be doing. At some point in this semester I have GOT to relearn my diacritic marks. However, that point was not over break. It might not be this weekend either. I am slowly but surely coming to terms with the fact that I cannot accomplish fifteen assignments a day.
I will close with two posts that I have enjoyed very much recently. This lucky mama actually got to meet Barry Prizant. And talk to him. And I am jealous, because I am a huge nerd. XD It was fascinating to read about how her son Bud moved from copying others' speech (echolalia) to forming sentences on his own. It was great to have a real-life example of Dr. Prizant's research.
I thought that this dad's keynote address at the Assistive Technology Cluster Conference did a fantastic job of comparing and contrasting the role of parents and professionals when it comes to getting services for children in school. I was also keenly interested to hear about his beautiful daughter Schuyler, as AAC is an interest of mine and I won't take that class for another year.
Now to bed!

Fall Break

Fall Break is next Monday and Tuesday...two days to catch up-er, I mean, get ahead on massive amounts of homework and reading! My friend is having a hen party this weekend. I am not going. :( It's three hours away, and I can't afford to forgo academia for a whole weekend. I also can't afford the gas, as the school was supposed to deduct my monthly tuition payment on the 1st and they haven't done it yet and so $800 might go randomly missing in the night at any time. -_- I am hoping to forgo academia for two weekends coming up, to go to the wedding of the friend having the hen party and the party of another friend. I am just waiting to get 15 new clients the week that I am supposed to go, necessitating that I pitch a tent at the clinic and rewatch therapy videos/write SOAPs/write lesson plans/pick play-doh out of my hair all weekend instead of having fun with my friends.
I continue to work with the clients I currently have, two through early intervention and a group for accent modification. I'm having trouble hitting the right level with one of my little ones...I do things above his level and below his level but keep missing where he actually is. The accent modification is good transcription and data-taking practice, as well as an exercise in finding synonyms on the spot when they inevitably don't know the vocabulary in the readings I pick. ;) My clients are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and they present very unique challenges. I'm really excited to be working with them...only on a beautiful fall Friday morning before a break, it's hard to focus on the afternoon's therapy. ;) Ah well. Happy weekend all!