The first two years with a baby with Down syndrome are a lot of work, but then it all gets easier.

I have repeated that sentence, spoken by the caseworker from our county’s DD Board when Lyra was only a few months old, many times over in my thoughts. Lyra turned two years old in August of last year, and for the past six months, I have considered where Lyra is now, and also how our family has transitioned and developed with this fifth child, our only daughter who has Down syndrome.

Yet I have struggled in my attempts to write about this pivotal place where we find ourselves after long anticipation. Two months ago, I wrote “Two Years This Family” intending to immediately follow that essay with “Two Years This Daughter.” And I tried, writing two lengthy drafts that I promptly shelved. Instead, I found more enjoyment writing other pieces, which are also about Lyra, the reality of Down syndrome today and how our society, by in large, remains misguided in its understanding and treatment of people with Down syndrome. Those essays, like all my writing, did not come easily, but were the products of days spent at my desk, writing and re-writing until my brain, as it does after a long day of writing, would buzz like a nest of agitated hornets. That’s when I know to step away from my computer, consider a shower and head out for a long hike. A missing sentence or section or elusive phrasing will sift up, time and again, when I am deep in the woods, breathing hard as I hike up the hills of a two-mile trail in the metropark near our house, not concentrating, but lightly holding the piece of writing, as though it were floating like a cartoonist’s thought bubble, just above my head. It was good, hard work, resulting in essays that I submitted for publication rather than post on Whoopsie Piggle.

The problem with my previous attempts to write about Lyra at the age of two is the essays were boring to write and, thus, boring to read. It is my job, as a writer, to make the material engaging. But describing therapy sessions that began, in the case of speech, when Lyra was a few months old became a dry litany in my hands: we did this, and then this, and some more of this with a little added that, until here we are today, still doing some of the same, but not all the same and trying out some other things as well. Let’s skip the process for now and get to the results:

• Lyra walks and
• She talks and
• She feeds herself and
• She plays with toys, but more often disappears in the house and takes everything out of any cupboard, dresser drawer or laundry basket she finds within her reach that has been left unsecured. “I see it has been raining baby clothes,” Max says after Lyra has shoved, yet again, several of her shirts or Leif’s pants through the railings of the balustrade on the second floor of our home. Clean clothes purloined from the dressers in the adjacent bedrooms only to be flung onto carpeting coated in cat hair. Thanks, kids.

  

  

  

Yes, Lyra’s acquisition of early childhood milestones came later than for most typical children. But not all that much later and now, at two and a half, Lyra is pretty much like any two-year-old.

The difference lies less with our daughter than with us, which is what Lyra’s caseworker meant by “a lot of work.” Before Lyra, I had never broken down the mechanics of a baby learning to hold up her head, sit up, crawl or walk (gross motor skills). Neither had I considered that my babies picked things up by first using their fingers as rakes and later developing a precision pincer grip with their forefingers and thumbs (fine motor skills). Nor had I worked to train a baby’s tongue to move into the mouth and not rest on his lips (important for speech). I know how to drive a car even though I don’t know the first thing about the mechanics of automobiles. Similarly, I have long understood how to raise small children but my focus was on behavior and education, not how their little bodies went from infant blobs to motoring and motor-mouthed toddlers. They took care of that part of development themselves.

This begs the question, for me at least, how would Lyra have developed without interventions? I have no doubt that she would have learned to sit up, crawl and walk, but perhaps later. More importantly, I believe many of the interventions have helped Lyra learn how to move and use her body correctly, minimizing any overcompensation for her low muscle tone, or hypotonia, a hallmark complication of Down syndrome. And as a socially extroverted child, there is no question Lyra would be talking even if she had not had any speech therapy. However, she would be harder to understand. That is because we have spent over two years helping strengthen Lyra’s tongue and train it to stay, for the most part, in her mouth. The importance of tongue placement for speech was explained to us by Talk Tools founder and speech therapist, Sara Rosenfeld-Johnson, at the 2013 National Down Syndrome Congress convention. She told the audience to sit back in their chairs and lift up both legs so that they were parallel to the floor. She then asked us to move our legs, in tandem, from side to side, around in circles, up and down. After that, she asked us to scoot forward on our seats and try to do the same thing with our legs. What was simple when sitting back was nearly impossible when sitting on the edge of our seats. The same is true with tongues and speech. When positioned on the lips, a tongue is far harder to control and speech less precise than when a tongue is positioned inside the mouth.

There are many subtopics and nuances to Lyra’s interventions, such as the significance of music in Lyra’s learning or long-term breast feeding, that are important, sure, but those are perhaps best described in separate essays.

I wish I had worried less about the person my child would become and just enjoyed the baby she was.

I also regularly think of this quote, which I included in the essay, “Learning About Lyra,” more than two years ago. When I first read those words, just weeks after Lyra’s birth, in a book about children with Down syndrome, I knew I should do just that—stop worrying. And I also knew I could not. I had never had a child with Down syndrome. Before Lyra, I knew only one other child with Down syndrome, the daughter of an acquaintance, whom I met once, when she was a baby. After Lyra’s birth, I began to meet other families in the area through our local support group, The Upside of Downs. But equally as helpful has been a closed Facebook group for mothers of children with Down syndrome who were born the same year as Lyra. These support groups helped in the early days as we learned what we could expect for our daughter both immediately and as an adult. Yet I would be lying if I said I have not found myself, on occasion, comparing Lyra to other babies with Down syndrome who acquired developmental milestones before she did.

It turns out what has most helped me to stop worrying about Lyra is Lyra herself. As she moved out of infancy, her personality revealed itself, as any baby’s does. She’s an outgoing, curious child who loves music, dogs, cats and her brothers. Five-year-old Leif now complains that Lyra tackles him and all too often Lyra yells when he pries toys or cookies out of her hands. It’s no different than the way my first two children interacted when they were five and two.

Lyra, my youngest child, is my girl. And she’s Max’s girl. She’s her brothers’ sister and a friend to her mates at daycare. Two years after her birth, all that Lyra is has normalized. Her Down syndrome, her aphakia and contact lenses are no longer novel to us. Just as having a fifth child who is a daughter (a daughter!) has become routine. (Okay, so maybe the daughter part still tickles me like getting a long-desired present.) The point is we are a family of seven, each of us having different personalities and abilities. Claude, who is quiet and steady except when he’s excited, now writes fiction with content more intense than expected from someone so young. Hugo is confident, if not self-absorbed, demonstrably affectionate and sings like an angel. Jules, whose name means youthful, has the oldest soul of us all. He cares for everyone and everything while quietly carrying deep hurts and anger. Leif is like Hugo: bombastic, demanding and sharp-witted. Max, with his implacable patience, may have missed out on the thing he does so well, being a dad, had we not tumbled into his life when he was in his early forties. And I, who spent much of my childhood alone and lonely, never lack for company. Or love. (Could we queue in a little Sister Sledge here, please? You know the tune.)