One of the first things I did after Lia’s diagnosis for T1 was go out and buy dress clothes. It sounds crazy, I know, especially all of these twenty-five months later. What an impulsive, irrational thing to do, right, as if $100 slacks, a couple of nice shirts, and

The way the year ended was pretty much the way that it started with a trip to the children’s wing of the hospital. Only this time our purpose there was not to admit Lia for what would become a very long and arduous twelve months discovering and treating diabetes,

The Things We Have Now It was a cold, beautiful night with fresh snow on the ground and because it was cold and had snowed we stayed in our day clothes after dinner and put on our boots and heavy winter jackets and slipped on our gloves and knit caps

roughly 2,000 finger sticks roughly 500 middle of the night blood sugar checks roughly 700 shots roughly 60 infusion set changes roughly 200 episodes of hypoglycemia roughly 1000 episodes of hyperglycemia roughly feeling like a perfectly fine nine year old 1.5 days out of every 3 roughly counting

Since Lia’s diagnosis eleven and a half months ago one of the things we’ve been watchful of and spent many long hours safeguarding against was the effect diabetes would have, if any, on everyone’s self-esteem. We watched out especially for Lia’s, but our worry was not

It was a common yet unproductive habit in the days, weeks and months following Lia’s diagnosis to do as any worried parent might do and question every external encounter or genetic mutation in our family history in pursuit of where had this come from. Often it wasn’t a

Back in the late summer my local branch of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation invited me to take part in, among other things, the logistical and production planning of this year’s Walk to Cure Diabetes. When the offer came, I thought it was long overdue as Franca and I

There is something I just don’t get yet. For as long as we’ve been administering Lia’s insulin through a pump we routinely find ourselves relying on intuition when determining her dose. A word problem of how this happens might look something like this: Lia and her dad

We submitted our application to the JDRF Children’s Congress early last week and in so doing took one more potential step from the shadows of obscurity into the spotlight that is the ardent voice of advocacy and awareness. Our story. Our faces. Our family. There are two things that

Part Two I was introduced to Jimmy Buffett’s music on prom night of my senior year, twenty-seven years ago. The song was: Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw, and while the song may have been appropriate for the season (or not), it left an impression on me