{"id":13635,"date":"2018-08-15T08:00:50","date_gmt":"2018-08-15T12:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gigisplayhouse.org\/fortmyers\/?p=13635"},"modified":"2018-08-14T08:31:40","modified_gmt":"2018-08-14T12:31:40","slug":"generationg-a-true-story-of-miracles-hope-and-unconditional-acceptance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gigisplayhouse.org\/fortmyers\/generationg-a-true-story-of-miracles-hope-and-unconditional-acceptance\/","title":{"rendered":"#GenerationG: A True Story of Miracles, Hope, and Unconditional acceptance"},"content":{"rendered":"

#GenerationG: A True Story of Miracles, Hope, and Unconditional Acceptance<\/a><\/p>\n

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There were tears, “ah ha” moments, laugh out loads, and smiles while reading Nancy Gianni’s new book #Generation G: A True Story of Miracles, Hope, and Unconditional Acceptance.<\/em>\u00a0Truthfully, I didn’t want to read it.\u00a0 Really had to talk myself into this one.\u00a0 Not because I didn’t want to know what she wrote, not because I don’t like her (in fact she’s one of my heroes), but because a long time ago, I decided to stop reading about Down syndrome.\u00a0 When Sofia was born, I read everything.\u00a0 Quite literally.\u00a0 In fact, there were even research papers I read.\u00a0 Like, scientific study type research, and I didn’t just read everything once.\u00a0 I read everything until I couldn’t see the words anymore.\u00a0 At some point, I stopped.\u00a0 I think I was mentally overloaded.\u00a0 Everything I read, even when they weren’t trying to sound like my life was over, sounded like my life was over.\u00a0 I took it hard.\u00a0 Crazier still, is that I didn’t believe anything they were saying.\u00a0 Sofia was Sofia.\u00a0 Just Sofi-bean.\u00a0 So, I stopped. Needless to say, this was a great way to restart my Down syndrome reading (I’ve even bought my next read, Up Syndrome<\/em>\u00a0by Megan Abner).<\/p>\n

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Nancy is an amazing person.\u00a0 Really.\u00a0 You can’t not like her.\u00a0 She spews “HELLO I’M HERE” while using jazz hands and a big smile.\u00a0Maybe not.\u00a0 The point is, she’s high energy, and someone you know has it together.\u00a0\u00a0What surprised me the most about the book is how honest and relatable Nancy is.\u00a0 You’d think since I was part of starting a GiGi’s Playhouse, I would\u00a0know more about the happenings of our founder.\u00a0 To be honest, maybe it was blind faith, but I had no idea how hard Nancy or INC has it.\u00a0 This is HARD.\u00a0 Constantly asking people for money to build a dream is exhausting.\u00a0 But Nancy never let on that she worries so much about the Playhouses. In retrospect, I think it is a little blind faith, but I also think we (founders, board members, volunteers) somehow get this gut feeling that this place needs to exist.\u00a0 We have that feeling of “I NEED TO CHANGE THE WORLD,\u201d so we push ourselves past what most people think is even remotely do-able.<\/p>\n

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Nancy’s resilience and devotion to changing the world is incredible, and we’re lucky to have her as a fellow mom.\u00a0 I know a huge piece of our lives would have been missing without our Playhouse.\u00a0 I know that because of Nancy\u2019s inner strength and belief in miracles, somehow some of that sunshine hit us miles away as well as hundreds of others operating Playhouses across the United States and Mexico.\u00a0 I know that there’s no greater feeling than seeing the Playhouse full of people, meeting new parents with a hug and congratulations, or simply knowing that there’s some place we belong.<\/p>\n

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Two weeks ago, while looking into potential daycare centers for my daughter and son, I had a woman politely answer the phone, tell me she was excited to get to know me and my children.\u00a0 At the very end of the conversation, I told her our daughter had Down syndrome, thinking it would be better to tell her now than get the stares when we arrived.\u00a0 Instead, she told me that their teachers didn’t have “that type of training” and it would “really be a disservice” to my daughter.\u00a0 I responded with, “she’s verbal and potty-trained” knowing all too well that the manager of the daycare didn’t think she was.\u00a0 I proceeded with “So, you’re not even willing to see if it would work, you just point blank don’t think she’s a fit.”\u00a0 Of course, that was followed by polite “oh no, we’d love her.”\u00a0 In Nancy’s story, her daughter, GiGi, had a similar experience.\u00a0 They were asked to leave a daycare because the other parents didn’t feel comfortable with GiGi.\u00a0 Here’s my hero, who like I said, has it all together… but really, she’s just like us.\u00a0 She fights the same fight we do, every day.<\/p>\n

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How’d I feel after reading #Generation G<\/em>? Simple.\u00a0 I thought, \u201cOkay, Nancy, let’s go.\u00a0 Let’s do this.” It was empowering.\u00a0 Some days when it gets really hard, or the days where we just can’t get her to jump (literally – she’s done it once *at the Playhouse* and never again).\u00a0 The days where her school-mates ask me why Sofia can’t do things the same way they can.\u00a0 The days where people stare at her, or\u00a0days where day cares don’t want her.\u00a0 The days where I don’t know what I’m going to do when she grows up…these thoughts just keep playing in my mind.\u00a0 Days like these are when I need books like this.\u00a0 We’re all in this together, and it’s an amazing family.\u00a0 I’ve met people of all walks of life, and we all blend together.\u00a0 Just when one of us starts to fall, someone is there to pick us back up and remind us that we got this.\u00a0 We can do this.\u00a0 That’s Nancy’s book. That’s the take away.\u00a0 We can do this #GenerationG.<\/p>\n

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I may not start reading every book I get my hands on about Down syndrome again, but this was a good start.\u00a0 #Generation G<\/em> started in a place of love, pushed forward by the hope for change, and we’re just getting started.\u00a0 There’s something incredible when you get a group of people to all start moving in the same direction.\u00a0 When you really start to see the change in the world.\u00a0 That hope, the perseverance, the blind faith.\u00a0 Those are the miracles.\u00a0 We have a long way to go, but if I’ve learned anything from Nancy, it’s to believe.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

#GenerationG: A True Story of Miracles, Hope, and Unconditional Acceptance   There were tears, “ah ha” moments, laugh out loads, and smiles while reading Nancy Gianni’s new book #Generation G: A True Story of Miracles, Hope, and Unconditional Acceptance.\u00a0Truthfully, I didn’t want to read it.\u00a0 Really had to talk myself into this one.\u00a0 Not because…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":173,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gigisplayhouse.org\/fortmyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gigisplayhouse.org\/fortmyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gigisplayhouse.org\/fortmyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gigisplayhouse.org\/fortmyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/173"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gigisplayhouse.org\/fortmyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gigisplayhouse.org\/fortmyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13635\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gigisplayhouse.org\/fortmyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gigisplayhouse.org\/fortmyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gigisplayhouse.org\/fortmyers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}