Welcome to our family friendly fun website. We we offer many topics of special interest for families with disabilities, including adoptions, pregnancy and baby care, arts & crafts and music therapy, backyard wildlife, celebrations and parties, children with disabilities, childrens literature, family cooking, special food and diets, families with disabilities, disability rights, employment and working at home, family finances and special needs planning, family fun and games, special needs parenting and grandparenting, family health and fitness, family history and genealogy, family friendly Internet safety, family life and relationships, personal stories, inspiration and spirituality, medical, senior care, special needs families and community, special education and home schooling, accessible gardening, accessible home, family recreation and vacations, self improvement, self defense, and teenagers with disabilities.

Here are excerpts from some of the topics that you will find on our family friendly fun website:

The creative process of making of arts and crafts is both healing and family life enhancing. Arts and crafts therapy that allows for emotional expression and healing through nonverbal means and is used with children and adults in various healing and self growth situations.

Every day people benefit from assistive technology and do gain more independence. New technological developments have raised the expectation that people with disabilities can use assistive devices to function more independently in their homes and communities, and pursue vocational goals. 

Communication is an effective tool to develop and maintain a strong relationship with your child. This article offers advice and tips to improve communication with children with disabilities.

Through children's stories, children learn to cope constructively with complex emotions like fear and jealousy or stressful experiences. Children often identify strongly with storybook characters, and indirectly work through their day-to-day problems by reading about other children's problems and solutions. And they take comfort in knowing they are not alone.

Music therapy can help individuals on their journey of self-growth and understanding. Music is effective because it is a nonverbal form of communication, it is a natural reinforcer, it is immediate in time, and is successful because almost everyone responds positively to some kind of music. Music Therapy is particularly useful with autistic children.

Most of our team members or their families have a disability, so we understand the extra financial burden and time demands on a family with disabilities. Our team has developed a special work at home business solution to create financial security for our families.

Playing family games together affords a perfect opportunity for both personal and social development... an opportunity to learn and grow together as a family.

Luckily, there are no "real" sports designed specifically for family participation. The "real" sports have their big leagues and little leagues, but none have leagues where big and little people play together. I say "luckily" because this gives us permission to make up our own family recreation sport. And, even more luckily, the sport that we make up together is very likely to be the very sport that we can all have fun playing together.

Bullying is an issue of great concern for both parents and children in today's society. It is not, as some would say, "normal behavior" or "the right of passage". In American schools and communities bullying has reached epidemic proportions. Its devastating scars affect the lives of children for years to come. Today, many children and adults are being taught self defense.

Have fun in your own backyard by starting a backyard wildlife habitat. It's easy to create and a pleasure to see the beautiful birds, butterflies and other animals in your own backyard. Also, as more land is consumed, our backyard friends need to find new homes. You can help by creating a home for them in your own backyard.

Whether you are having a holiday celebration, birthday party, anniversary, family reunion or other family get-together, here are a few tips and ideas to help make your family celebration a success.

Do you enjoy having family fun with your children or grandchildren? Having fun brings not only enjoyment but BIG health benefits, too. And if you look carefully, you can find fun is whatever you do. Taking time for the things that you enjoy can help you feel better about yourself and be more satisfied with life. Here are some tips to help you get started.

Family fitness explains the importance of a balanced fitness program and how to modify existing fitness programs to enable people with disabilities to participate.

To provide, your child with the most stimulating environment possible, it's important to understand speech-sound disorders. With this knowledge and speech therapy, you will be able to find the best ways to help your child learn.

Travel is by its very nature an adventure, but factor a disability into the family vacation and things can get pretty scary. One of the biggest areas of concern for disabled travelers is air travel. People just don't know what to expect, but it doesn't have to be that way. A little consumer education can give you the confidence and knowledge to effectively deal with problems as they arise.

Our website offers an online community for families, parents, caregivers and professionals to meet online, including a chat room, bulletin board, newsletter and e-Group forum.

For ease of navigation, we provide a navigation bar at the top of every page. This navigation bar provides quick links to our online community (meet), topics of special interest, resource files for families with special needs, and our yellow tour bus. For first time visitors, we suggest that you take a tour of our website by clicking on the yellow tour bus in the upper right-hand corner of each page.

Our Special Needs Family newsletter is a periodic community newsletter with articles from parents and professionals on a wide variety of family-related topics.

Use our disabilities news and family health pages to view authoritative news sources.

We offer many topics of special interest for families with disabilities:

Adoption | Arts & Crafts | Baby care | Backyard wildlife | Celebrations | Children | Childrens literature | Family cooking | Families with disabilities | Families disabilities | Disability Rights | Employment | Family finances | Family fitness | Family fun | Family games | Grandparenting | Family health | Family history | Family friendly Internet safety | Family life | Family stories | Inspirational | Medical | Music therapy | Senior care | Special needs community | Special diets | Special needs families | Special education | Special foods | Family fun | Accessible gardening | Family health | Accessible home | Occupational therapy | Family recreation | Home schooling | Special needs parenting | Special needs planning | Pregnancy | Family relationships | Self improvement | Self defense | Spirituality | Teenagers with disabilities | Family vacations | Work at home business

We also offer a directory of resource files for families with disabilities:

Adaptive Assistive | Addiction | Adults | Arts | Babies | Behavioral | Cardiovascular | Celebrations | Children | Community | Developmental | Digestive | Disability | Educational | Employment | Endocrine | Entertaining | Family | Financial | Food | Genetic | Health | Hobbies | Home | Illness | Immunologic | Inspirational | Integumentary | Learning | Legal | Lymphatic | Medical | Mental | Mobility | Muscular | Nervous | Oncologic | Parenting | Personal | Pets | Pregnancy | Recreational | Relationships | Reproductive | Respiratory | Safety | Sensory | Skeletal | Special care | Therapy | Urinary |

This website was conceived after our first-born daughter Monica was born. On December 22, Monica came into this world with multiple birth defects including skull, arm and hand deformities, an occipital encephalocele containing brain matter, sensory, cognitive and motor impairments including blindness, mental retardation and cerebral palsy.

Two days after her birth, on Christmas Eve, Monica survived life-threatening brain surgery that removed the occipital encephalocele - our own Christmas miracle! Two years later, Monica had arm and hand surgery to relieve severe arm and finger constrictions that were due to amniotic band syndrome.

At age 13, just a week before Christmas, Monica had spinal fusion surgery to stop progressive scoliosis. Monica recovered quickly from this surgery because of her strong desire to get up out of bed and learn to walk again. She was discharged within a week (a very short hospital recovery period for this 6 hour spinal operation) and came home on Christmas Eve. What a blessing it was to have Monica at home with us to celebrate Christmas! We invite you to read the rest of Monica's miraculous story of her struggles and accomplishments, her strong will to learn and enjoy life.

We hope that you enjoy your visit to our web site. We hope that you bookmark our web site and come back often, as we are constantly updating it. Your comments are most welcome.