Kimberly Stevens Lane was born to a Costa Rican mother and an American father and was raised in both countries. She is the mother of four-year-old twin boys, both of whom have special needs and are in full-time special education programs. She has a Master of Arts degree in Conference Interpretation and is a freelance translator and interpreter in the Washington, D.C. area.
My son Secondo was diagnosed with autism in late 2008. There were unfamiliar doctors bearing clipboards, lots of tears and tissues, and I remember riding home from the hospital in a haze, feeling fragile and powerless to stop the bottom from falling out of my world. His diagnosis changed everything. My son Primo was diagnosed with autism late last year. The appointment was more of a formality with a doctor we know and like, and we all shrugged our shouldersRead More ...
I’m sitting here writing this post from my mother’s home in Costa Rica, on what is our third annual summer trip here. Our plan is to keep coming for one month every year, and I’ve been curious to see what changes I might see year to year as my children get older. Yet, as I reread the post I wrote this time last year I had to laugh because everything I wrote then applies this year, too — I almostRead More ...
I use Skype all the time to keep in touch with relatives. My kids have several keepsake audiobooks from grandparents on their shelves. I travel for work and am often in a different time zone, so I can’t talk to my kids before bedtime. So the offerings from Be There Bedtime Stories sounded like they were right up my alley. The product is simple but very cool. Go to their site, pick a story (mostly geared towards children ages 3-8, andRead More ...
Sometimes it sounds like the ideal way to make absolutely sure that your children will grow up speaking Spanish: Hey, let’s move to Latin America. Spanish immersion! Problem solved. Except, of course, it’s not a simple thing to do. There are jobs, families, schooling to consider. Not to mention the fact that if it’s a long-term move, then you shift to worrying about your children keeping up with their English. I can honestly say that it’s not an option forRead More ...
I was that kid, the one who would disappear under the coffee table with a book for hours at a time, according to my mother. Books were my passion, my refuge. And I assumed that if I surrounded my own children with books from day one, if we read bedtime stories every night and made reading a priority, they would love books as much as I do. So I did, and so far, they do. We have books on ourRead More ...
It’s spring, which means it’s IEP season. My third one. Simply put, that means it’s time to get together with our special education team and discuss my children’s present level of performance in school, come up with annual goals for next year, and decide what special education services they will need. At the end of the process we will have an Individualized Education Program for each of them, a document that we will revisit periodically to check their progress. ThisRead More ...
Ana
Roxana
Just two mamás raising bilingual kids
