My Week of Chaos: 5 Kids, 1 Fetus, No Husband

By Jordana Horn, a contributing editor to Kveller

I’ll admit it: When my husband picked up his suitcase to leave to go to the Philippines for a week on business, my first impulse was not to set a good example for the five kids. Instead, I wanted to take a page out of my 1-year-old’s playbook and throw myself at my husband’s legs, yelling, “No! No! Don’t go! Take me! Don’t leave me here! I’ll do anything!”

Somehow, I refrained.

So my husband left for the other side of the planet, no doubt experiencing more tranquility in his approximately 24 hours of air travel than either he or I have felt in years. As Murphy would have it, however, back on the home front, the proverbial s--t hit the fan. And when two members of your household are incontinent, some of that s--t is not just proverbial, but literal (thankfully, it’s not yet warm enough to put on the fans).

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As My Son Turns 18, Looking Back On a Life With Autism

By Hannah Brown for Kveller

When I turned 18, I had my first legal drink–a strawberry daiquiri–at Windows on the World, the bar/restaurant that was located on the top floor of the World Trade Center.

When my oldest son, Danny, turns 18 next week, we will take a train from Jerusalem to Haifa, and then we will ride the Carmelit subway for a good part of the day.

Danny loves trains and has ever since he was diagnosed with autism when he was 3. In addition to marking his birthday with a cake in the evening, his father and I will become his legal guardians that day. When he was born, there was no World Autism Awareness Day, but it’s hard not to see the irony in the fact that April 2 is just six days before his birthday.

We moved back to Israel about a year after the diagnosis because Danny’s father is Israeli and wanted to head back home. Because of his autism, Danny won’t be drafted into the Israel Defense Forces, like most 18-year-olds here, but will stay in a school he loves, where he is learning and progressing. When he finishes up there, at the age of 21, he may or may not be high-functioning enough to serve in one of the IDF special-needs units.

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What Happened When My Son’s School Wouldn’t Accommodate His Auditory Processing Disorder

Alina Adams for Kveller

When he was 3 years old, my oldest son was barely talking. Our pediatrician suggested we get him checked out. It turned out he had some hearing loss due to recurrent ear infections. He was also diagnosed with Auditory Processing Disorder. As a result, he was placed into New York State’s Early Intervention program. He was initially referred for speech therapy, but within a few weeks, they were telling us he needed physical therapy and occupational therapy for his short attention span, inability to sit still, and poor crayon handling. I thought he was just a typical little boy, and that he’d outgrow it.

And he did.

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How My Youngest Child Finally Found Her Thing

Alina Adams for Kveller

When my oldest son was 2 years old, he sat mesmerized in front of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, “First Steps,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for half an hour. By the time he was 11, he was taking classes alongside adults at the Art Students League (for everyone who asks me how to keep a talented boy motivated, I have only one answer: female nude models).

When his younger brother started school, he was so active (read: hard to manage), that I enrolled him in dance classes as an outlet. Now, he takes pre-professional level ballet, modern, and Spanish dance seven hours a week. That is, when he’s not teaching himself to computer program.

Conversely, for the first years of their little sister’s life, her only activity was being dragged along on their activities. She was a very good sport about it. She’s a good sport about everything. But, eventually, it began to bother me that I was not putting the same kind of effort into encouraging and nurturing her interests, as I had with her brothers.


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