Things are getting better now, aren’t they? I was standing outside my daughter’s school preparing to go in for a Valentine’s Day party when my sister asked me this question over the phone. I paused only briefly, my hand on the door. It had been seven weeks

How the dispute ended with us and sugar was not so much a compromise as it was a surrender on our part. But since surrender conjures in the mind images of winners and losers, making it a hard word for at least one of the two to swallow, especially if

When it was just the five of us and no diabetes it was the desire Franca and I had of eating healthier foods, produced more sustainably and responsibly, that drove us to declare war on sugar. It started, as many such conflicts do, as a simple disagreement over turf: our

When the three of us arrived at this lavish resort there was much excitement and gaiety. It was sunny and warm and the hotel and landscaped grounds were elegant and stunning. We had travelled before as a family to other various interesting places — Paris, Rome, Belgium, Germany — but those trips

Our first month living with diabetes ended with our daughter, Lia, and Franca and I retreating for a weekend to a posh golf resort in the central part of our state. We were there to attend a statewide family outreach event sponsored by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and we

There were many ways our family and friends and other people we knew showed their concern for Lia and our family in the days following her diagnosis. The best one was the visit by John, Jenny and Jessie, who detoured their travel plans to see Lia in the hospital on

Two and a half weeks after Lia’s diagnosis she returned to school. The holiday break was a godsend, giving us time to get our arms around her diabetes, so by the time classes started back up we all had become lay experts in the field, at least in terms

I think about this, about her, a great deal of the time, especially when she is not near me. I wonder what she thinks of it. What she fears. What she knows about her diabetes. She is brilliant and surprises me every day with just how much she’s listened

I mentioned hope. In the days following Lia’s diagnosis, one of the first things we noticed in our efforts to understand diabetes was the plethora of information out there. Looking back through my internet search history for one day last week out of 289 different web pages I had

Here’s how it begins, our waking hours: Hugs, check blood sugar, plan meal, determine portions, count carbs, calculate insulin need, select site for injection, give shot, cry, comfort, then eat, fret, devour information on diabetes, fret more as we regurgitate the data we learned to one another, promise to