Amy D Lerner

By Amy D. Lerner
You know the story of the blind men and the elephant? They’re trying to figure out what this creature is in front of them. Each of the men feels a different part of the elephant, the trunk, the foot, the tail, and describes the elephant based on only that one part. They each come up with wildly different ideas about what an elephant is, and not one of them sees the big picture, the whole elephant.
My elephant is only 3 feet tall and 35 pounds, yet this story is still true.
Li...

Ah, summer. A time for sitting on the deck sipping lemonade while the kids play on the swing set. Or, as it more often looks, a time for scrambling to catch up on appointments the family put off during the school year, a time for staying up too late and then rousing grumpy kids for camp, a time for saying, “No more screen time – find something else to do!”

A couple of years ago I had had enough of these constant cycles of stress. I was exhausted by the end of every day and I knew there had to...

My daughter came home with coasters she made that looked almost tie-dyed. “This one’s my favorite,” she said, holding up one with a yellow center surrounded by bright blues and greens that faded into a soft peach.
Creating coasters was just one activity the group did at the most recent Sibshops she attended. Sibshops are special programs for school-age brothers and sisters of kids with special needs. The programs give kids a chance to talk about what it’s like to have a brother or sister with...

It was only a few short weeks ago that my youngest discovered the car cart at the grocery store. You know, the cart that’s the length of a semi-truck because it has a Little Tikes car basically glued to the front of it? The one that doesn’t steer because its weight is shifted to the front and one of the cart wheels is always misaligned? The one that makes me feel like Sisyphus, pushing this hulk of a grocery cart through the aisles in an uphill battle to check out before it all goes to pot? Y...

I was a young teen when I started doing crosswords with my mom. This is how we did crosswords: in pencil, with an eraser on the end, so you could misspell all you want. (Miscreant only has 9 letters? We spelled it with 10, so it could work in 5 across.) We crossed out the numbers in the clues because we worked haphazardly, sometimes guessing, usually reading down through all the clues but then going back to the fun ones or the easy corners. Writing in lowercase or upper, didn’t matter, we jus...

My mom made cookies for Thanksgiving two years ago instead of pie. It was a super soft and light pumpkin cookie with a pumpkin glaze, the perfect small treat to savor after the big meal.
I think about those cookies every now and then. I thought about them at a meeting at a local mosque, a gathering of the Hebrew school parents, teachers, and children, and the children, teachers, and parents who belong to the mosque, a chance for a small group of Jews and Muslims to meet and learn from each ot...

Six young adults were recently selected as Daner Fellows for 2017-2018. The year-long fellowship, in the intersection of the Jewish community and the disability inclusion movement, supports the fellows’ development in working as part of a dynamic, multidisciplinary team aimed to meet the social a...

Ah, summer. A time for sitting on the deck sipping lemonade while the kids play on the swing set. Or, as it more often looks, a time for scrambling to catch up on appointments the family put off during the school year, a time for staying up too late and then rousing grumpy kids for camp, a time f...

baking
In the past year I’ve made scones, cheesy garlic quick bread, chocolate chip challah, honey cookies, apple brunch cake, plum kuchen, chocolate zucchini cake…I could name more, but you get the drift. I like to bake.
Not only do I like to bake, my life is better for my baking. Sure, my famil...

I’ve been able to reconcile the death of my non-Jewish mom with an odd bit of Jewish learning....

Of all the ways things could have gone, I have followed a strange, narrow path indeed. So why shouldn’t my daughter’s be as well?...

I grew up around labs, beagles, terriers, German shorthairs, miniature poodles, and I loved them all. So how did I end up with two daughters who are afraid of dogs?......