I’m so happy to start contributing each week to this site by giving you a peek into the always growing community here. I joined this site a really long time ago, but thankfully Julia brought me in to be a little more involved in this space. A quick bio of me: I write stories of my life as an advocate for my almost six-year-old daughter who was Born Just Right – with one hand and one short arm. I’m also advocating for her nine-year-old brother who has attention challenges in life, but is learning to manage better every day. I’m also an interactive director at an NBC affiliate in Columbia, MO and an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. It all keeps me very busy. With it all, I’m passionate about connecting the many different special needs communities together. We can all use support from each other – especially when it comes to advocating for our kids.

It was a crazy week on our site! Thanks to our tech friends, the site is getting back to normal, there will be changes in the coming weeks, please comment if you see something that needs our attention.

We’re Giving Away an iPad2!

We’re partnering with Replace My Contacts to giveaway an iPad2. Be sure to check out how you can have a chance to win it and a $25 iTunes gift card for apps.

Around the Site!

A post that is worth taking note is checking out how @xtremeparenthood (a.k.a. Sunday) wrote about how her son, Sam, got lost in his school for a short time. His disappearance was discovered thanks to her bus driver. Be sure to read why it is so important to have a Wandering Emergency Plan.

New Members

As always, there are really wonderful people joining this site. I’ve quickly discovered that this is the part of this job that might take a while to accomplish. There are so many of you who have amazing experiences and lessons to share here. I could spend days just digging into your blogs

One of the new members who I couldn’t stop reading was Shannon Marshall‘s (@themamashannon) blog, My Not-So-Mundane Life. She blogs about her non-verbal autistic son and her neuro-typical daughter and being a single mom. There’s a lot to write about and she has a lot of really good stories.

Be sure to meet Joe Sweeney. (@gbsdad) His bio says he’s the adoptive parent of four special needs children and it looks like he just got started on Twitter. Also new to the site, meet Missy Kolosky. She’s the mom to two daughters and married to “one swell guy.” Her nine-year-old has MERLD (Mixed Expressive Receptive Language Disorder)

You can keep up with all of our members by visiting the Support for Special Needs directory.

Other Items

Of course, another important part of this site is the groups section. This is a great place to reach out, connect, ask questions and share advice.

I realize the site had some bumps and bruises this week, but get excited for the site’s new theme in the future and all the new and fun things we can do here. One thing you might want to consider doing if you haven’t already is to add your blog’s feed to our site. Here’s a link on how you can make that happen.

Have a great week. I look forward to meeting and sharing more with each of you every week.

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