Author Archives: Helen Baldwin

My 3-year-old grandson, James, adores his MomMom (me!) and treats me like royalty. He gently places a pillow behind my back on the couch and insists on propping up the footrest before covering me with a blanket so I’ll be cozy. He makes sure I’m fed well…

Just over two years after our baby Jeffrey died from spinal muscular atrophy, my brother-in-law, Steven, passed away. My husband, Randy, our two children, Matthew and Katie, and I made the long drive back to our old stomping grounds in Texas, for our first funeral of a loved…

As teens, my husband, Randy, and his brother kept bees in their family’s tiny backyard. Way back then, the protective gear was flimsy at best, and they both eventually sought less painful hobbies. The opening of a new local beekeeping store just before Randy’s retirement a…

Growing up, about the closest I got to yardwork was burying some poor mussels I’d brought back one summer from a family vacation on the Texas coast. Somehow I thought that hauling a handful or two of the already smelly critters in a shoebox of sand all the way…

BARK! BARK! WOOF! WOOF! The guest staying in our rental cabin had come down to the house. Our dogs, Honey and Maple, were banished to the kitchen until our guest returned to her car after a brief visit. I sat down to get back to work. BARK!…

Our sweet third baby, Jeffrey, arrived on a sunny May morning. Two months later, spinal muscular atrophy barged into our world. Hearing the prognosis of death before kindergarten was akin to being pummeled by a raging bull on one side and a tornado on the other. It…

As my husband, Randy, and I slipped into our mid 40s, God plopped a little surprise into our middle-aged laps: a pregnancy. Totally unprepared in all ways for a baby, we scrambled with preparations until we were dizzy. Our son, Matthew, who was 10 at the time, was…

Oct. 6, 1997. My husband, Randy, and I snagged a last-ditch effort to save our baby Jeffrey from spinal muscular atrophy’s deadly vise: meeting with a pulmonologist who was trying gabapentin on another young child in North Carolina. We were desperately eager to learn whether…

Before I turned 2, I loved watching “Wunda Wunda,” a children’s educational program on a local channel that showcased puppets, stories, and songs. My mother, preparing for the birth of my brother, couldn’t move quickly enough to turn the television off at the end of the show,…

Kudos and a whew! to us all for surviving 2020. Vastly understated, last year was memorable. Overall (and thankfully), my family managed to welcome the new year intact. However, a second loss connected to my teaching stint at Brockman School hit hard. Brockman, a self-contained school for…