When you focus on someone's disability you'll overlook their abilities, beauty and uniqueness. Once you learn to accept and love them for who they are, you subconsciously learn to love yourself unconditionally.

My children taught me the true meaning of unconditional love.

Often people ask, "How can you say you're blessed to have a son with Down syndrome?" My outlook on life has forever changed. I see my own challenges differently. He's always showing me that life is so much bigger than self.

Dad they think she has Down Syndrome." He smiled genuinely as his eyes welled up with tears. "That's okay. We love her.

What would happen, they conjectured, if they simply went on assuming their children would do everything. Perhaps not quickly. Perhaps not by the book. But what if they simply erased those growth and development charts, with their precise, constricting points and curves? What if they kept their expectations but erased the time line? What harm could it do? Why not try?

Don't let toxic people infect you with the fear of giving and receiving one of the most powerful forces in this world... LOVE!