An Excess of Lemons
— Neil Genzlinger

New Hampshire has its 4,000-Foot Challenge: Climb all 48 of the mountains in the White Mountain National Forest that are at least 4,000 feet high. Colorado has the 14ers Challenge: Climb all of the state’s peaks that rise at least 14,000 feet, of which there are…

There are three things it would never occur to me to do that some people actually do: Catch a rattlesnake and eat it.  Play hockey underwater. Board a commercial airliner wearing a Halloween costume. This last one comes to mind because of an article I saw…

My two most recent columns were about the documentary “Silent Angels: The Rett Syndrome Story,” and how it came to be. The film was broadcast on television in 2000, the year our daughter Abby, who has Rett syndrome, turned 3. When I rewatched it to write…

Last in a series. Read part one.  In part one of this tale, Barry Ross Rinehart told us how his casual offer to help a stranger with slides for a talk about Rett syndrome led him to direct a full-length documentary, “Silent Angels: The Rett Syndrome…

First in a series. It’s October, which means it’s Rett Syndrome Awareness Month, which means it’s a good time to have an email chat with Barry Ross Rinehart. So I did, and he was gracious enough to tell me about the making of “Silent Angels,” a documentary…

Herewith another installment of the T-Shirt Chronicles, in which I relate episodes from our family’s life with Rett syndrome as represented by garments in our ridiculously outsized collection of T-shirts. Some of those T-shirts are mine. Some belong to my wife, Donna, or my daughter Abby, who has Rett…

National Grandparents Day was this past Sunday, and it was great to see social media photos and videos of grandparents supporting and loving their grandchildren who have Rett syndrome, the condition that my daughter Abby has endured for 29 years. Abby, alas, has to be content with my…

This was our second summer without Camp Communicate. Our daughter Abby, who has Rett syndrome and is nonverbal, never really got the full benefit out of the camp, which sought to encourage nonverbal kids to use their communication devices. But the absence of the camp has left a…

I confess that I am a T-shirt hoarder. I have dozens, many of them embarrassingly old. How bad is my habit? I am in my Social Security years, and I still have a T-shirt from my high school fraternity. And yes, it still fits, kinda. Occasionally I make an effort…

If, like me, you have a child with Rett syndrome and an older, neurotypical child, it’s easy to fall into the “she’ll never” cauldron of gloom.  “She’ll never get two MVP awards in high school softball like her older sister.”  “She’ll never earn three college degrees like…

The area where I live in central New Jersey seems as if it’s becoming the warehouse capital of the country. For a decade or two, warehouses have been springing up like dandelions, some with recognizable names like Amazon on their signage, others offering no clue to passersby as to who…