I don’t know about you, but we had an extraordinarily quiet Christmas this year.  For the past several years, Christmas vacation was filled with cousins playing, skiing, endless noise and activity.  For us, and many others, this year was different.  Not only do we have less family around but less activities in general.  Now, quiet isn’t all bad.  I’ll admit, it is nice to breathe and actually have a vacation, but as I looked into my son’s longing eyes, not sure what to do with all of this free time after Christmas, I revisited the true grief I sometimes feel when I recall my own childhood Christmases.  Now, I realize…

When we find out we’re going to be a parent, planning immediately ensues.  Is it a boy or girl?  Will she like sports, or music, or both?  Who will she look like?  And we begin to dream about what we will buy her, the activities she will do, what her first day of kindergarten will look like.  Yes, we might have a concern here or there based on challenges others have had, but, more often than not, we will brush them aside and choose a Pollyanna-type optimism instead.  All parents find out in one defining moment or another, however, that our Utopian vision of parenting was just that, a vision,…