What goes down, must come up!!!

      "Why is she so tiny?" I asked my mom driving down the road to daycare one day. I was pertaining to a young girl who had Down Syndrome that attended the same daycare as me. She was born three weeks early and I attributed her small size to the fact that she was born "early". By the time she was eight or nine months old though, I was really starting to wonder what was wrong.

        During this conversation in the car with my mother, she let me know that this young girl had down syndrome. Yes, DOWN syndrome. She was small and had this condition that sounded small too. I then took my facts and looked at them. I came to the conclusion that she was small because of this condition and that short people had down syndrome. This was a bad idea for me as I would later learn.

        Several years later, I was attending a local day camp. There were kids of all different shapes and sizes there. There were small kids and big kids. There were short kids  and there were tall kids, but there were no kids with down syndrome. I being somewhat short, ran into a rather tall kid, but that wasn't the end.

        I would continue to work next to this individual on a nature craft we had been working on. I was talking to him and socially interacting as we did while at camp. Then the thought crossed my mind. I went back to that idea about that young girl with down syndrome. If that young girl with down syndrome, is short, than this kid who is tall must have up syndrome. Yes, I he had up syndrome I thought. So, I went on and thought about this a little longer. I decided to turn to this kid, look him in the eyes (because I am that cool that I have good eye contact) and ask him if he had up syndrome. His, reply was no. Guess what I did then? I proceeded to say, but your tall so you must have up syndrome. I am not exactly sure how the conversation went from there, but I am sure he was extremely confused.

       Now that I look back on this, I can see that even at such a young and innocent age, I was more literal than my peers. Surely no kid at my age who knew what Down Syndrome was, would think up these ideas. I sure had the wheels turning, but I was trying to make sense of my world. At this time I am still trying to work on some of this literal stuff. I may not be trying to connect the facts that there is no up syndrome, but I am working on other stuff right now.

      For instance, I have a friend that will be moving soon. This friend I have become really close with, but with long distance, I have to understand that not everything is black and white. I have to understand that this person isn't going to be a stranger, but they aren't going to be a best friend either. They are going to stay in contact with me, but we don't know how often. So they aren't friend or a stranger, but something in between. Maybe that person I ran into didn't have down syndrome or up syndrome but maybe he was a tall average in between.