The long awaited blog post is finally here! So many of you guys, along with Alex have literally been harassing be to write Niko’s adoption story, so here it is…. As most of you remember this time last year we were in the middle of a long preparation to bring a little boy into our family. After 3 months of hard emotionally draining work, preparation, communication and arrangements the adoption fell through for various reasons. I would be lying if I said this situation didn’t leave a bitter taste in our mouths. It was a hard few months to have ended how it did. We are firm believers in ‘things h ..read more

Last month we got a little note sent home in Jaxson’s lunchbox. It was a note telling us that he had upcoming school photos. Immediately I got excited. His very first school photos! Of course we have more than enough nice pictures of him, the perks of having a mommarazzi. But there’s something about school photos that I will totally get sucked into buying. A few days before his scheduled photos I started thinking about what he was going to wear. Should he go all preppy in a collared shirt or should he go as ‘cool kid’ in a rad shirt and ripped jeans? I consulted friends and the consensus was p ..read more

I’ve made a couple of posts about ‘Jaxson’s User Manual’ that I made for his school. The response to the manual has been HUGE. People wanting to know exactly what is in it, or better yet, people wanting to pay me to make them one! hahaha! So I thought I would write up a quick blog post showing you what his user manual is all about. The day we took a tour of the preschool he was going to be going to in early spring, was the day I started to get extreme anxiety about him going. I knew the day would come, but didn’t think it would happen so fast. The opportunity presented itself for him to go to ..read more

We finally bit the bullet and decided it was time to get Jaxson fully potty trained. He was showing signs that he was ready (will get in to detail on that below), and the timing just seemed right to give it a go. We were finally home and able to put in the work, and Jax wasn’t due back to go to school for another 2 weeks, so it just made sense to give it a try and hopefully send him back to school in undies! One of my online Ds momma friends posted a blog that she read/followed about potty training kiddos with Ds. Alex and I read it, initially thought it was a bit to intensive for us and did o ..read more

Hello there!! Remember me? Probably not!! Just taking a peek here and apparently my last post was 6 months ago…. Ummmmm holy hell has it been that long!? Needless to say our life is crazy. Turtle Nest Co. has become WAY WAY WAY bigger than I had ever thought. It occupies ALL of my spare time. Alex has made some comments here and there, “wow it’s been a long time since you’ve blogged” or “don’t you think you should write a blog post”. This makes me want to backhand her, lol! But she’s right. So tonight just as I finished tucking Jaxson in, a thunderstorm knocked the power out. So here I sit wit ..read more

I love our Down syndrome community so much, but sometimes I really really hate it. Recently our community has lost some perfect little souls. Some were due to crazy freak accidents that could happen to any one of our kiddos, others were taken by cancer, and a few succumbed to cardiac issues post open heart surgery. In such a short period of time our community has been mourning one precious child after another. It’s not fair, it’s heartbreaking, it’s completely and utterly devastating. My heart is completely shattered for the parents and siblings left behind. It’s unimaginable the pain and sorr ..read more

When Alex started her job at Suffield Fire Dept. one of the guys approached her asking about her son with Down syndrome. He then went on to tell her that a local speech therapy place contracts his stables and horses to do hippotherapy with children. He encouraged her to check out and said that Jax was probably old enough to do it. It was something that we definitely wanted to try with him and we talked about it quite often. Fast forward a few months to when I saw that this speech therapy place had posted on facebook that they were starting a hippotherapy session this fall. Immediately we got s ..read more

It’s no secret that we have endured some major sleep issues with Jaxson. He was an amazing sleeper until he got RSV when he was 8 months old and it was all downhill from there. The single most frustrating part of this journey has been waiting for referrals, appointments, results and proper treatment. It took 16 LONG horrendous months from the time we got referred to the sleep clinic until he was on the proper treatment regime. During those 16 months we were dealing with 10-15 wake up’s every single night. There were many nights where I would just sit there holding him and cry out of frustratio ..read more

Every single special needs parent is guilty of this. I am 100% sure of this, because I am guilty of the same offence. We have quite a large following on our instagram account, and I try to post at least one picture a day to appease Jaxson’s followers. Ask Alex how crazy I am when taking a choosing a photo to post….. I literally take 10 photos in the matter of a few seconds, I then scroll through them and choose the best one (Obviously). I’m looking for a nice smile, or clarity of the photo, or for Jax to have a good expression, but I’m also choosing a picture that makes him look ‘good’. But to ..read more

As most of you know I have worked in EMS since I was 18 years old. I spent 4 years working as an EMT and 9 years as a Paramedic. The last 2 years I have been off car and I became a stay at home mom. Needless to say it was a HUGE transition, but so so so necessary. Becoming a mom was my ‘out’ from EMS, or so I thought…. Everything changes when you become a mom. I know you hear it time and time again, but it is so very true. For me, becoming a mom and distancing from the sick world of EMS totally changed my entire being. I started to develop feelings, I started to actually care about people, an ..read more