Each year my mother’s side of the family has a reunion. Since Monkey’s birth we’ve been making sure that we go each year. Today was the big day.
Monkey did really well today too, he’s not a huge fan of crowds or strangers so I was expecting that he’d be really whiny but he wasn’t. He smiled a lot and interacted with people. He even laughed when his cousin tickled him. Normally he doesn’t like anyone but Duhdee or I to touch him. I was really impressed with his behavior. I was also impressed with his eating. He ate 3 hotdogs, 1/2 a hamburger, a half serving of potato salad and about 1/2 a cupcake. Pretty impressive for a wee boy.
We also got some very interesting news. The week before another branch of the family had a reunion and it came out that there are 10 people in that branch of the family with Fragile X, it’s the kids of my generation who are the ones that are turning up affected and now some of the older “kids” are being tested too…they’d never had a diagnosis before. This just sucks. We need to find a cure. I gave my e-mail address to someone who is supposed to send me the contact info for the other side of the family since I don’t know them yet. I mentioned that anyone who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in the family should be tested for FXTAS and it turns out several of my grandfather’s generation have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. It’s really astounding. I wonder what will turn up there.