Tuesday, January 23, 2007

The book that kept me reading all weekend

I did something this past weekend that I really love to do but rarely manage: I read a book all the way through. Okay, I actually finished it up on Monday, but it's an almost-500 page book and I had less than 100 to go after Sunday. The page-turner in question was Tiny Titan, the non-fiction story of a family that survived through so many special-needs challenges that you cannot but put the book down at the end and say, "I am never going to whine about my simple, simple life again." (And, yet, I did whine about my simple, simple life yesterday, didn't I? Um, maybe I hadn't quite finished the book yet. I'm done with whining now, honest.) The titan of the title is a little girl born with Noonan Syndrome whose mother nursed and tended and advocated for her through innumerable medical crises. And then, when the medical crises were under control and the family budget was just starting to recover, what did this family of six do? Adopt another family of five from foster care, with suitcases full of emotional and mental-health baggage, including FASD, bipolar disorder, and RAD. Yet still they persevered, up and down, all along the roller coaster, in a book that's hard to put down. If you've got a free weekend, pick it up. It will make you feel better about the complications you face, and maybe a little worse because you don't face them with as much pluck and determination as the fightin' mom who wrote this book.

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