Blind parents adopt blind kids

[freakshow]

Pretty cool story, a bit of a long read...
Read the title for Coles.

The Province, May 16th, 2011

Love is blind inside the two-story brick house on Mulligan Avenue. And that is why the microwave buttons are marked with Braille. The clocks in the home all announce the time. And at 7:15 a.m., everyone is listening carefully for the school bus.

Ten-year-old Rupa is the first to hear it. "Oh, the bus is here!" she calls. Her mother rushes to the front window, listening for confirmation before calling out: "That's it!"

Rupa grabs her white cane. Six-year-old Aihua reaches down and, guided by touch alone, pulls on a pair of rubber rain boots. Then Paula Sprecher hustles them outside. With each step of this hectic school-day morning, the 49-year-old mother of two helps her daughters find their way in a world that neither she nor they can see.

Sprecher and her husband, Alan, have been legally blind since birth. And though Alan had some doubts about fatherhood would they have enough to offer a child? The couple took a leap of faith in 2008 and adopted Rupa from India. In January, they brought home Aihua from China.

Neither of the girls can see. And that is just fine with the Sprechers, who describe each of their daughters as "a gift."

"My husband and I, we grew up without sight," Paula explains. "This is so normal to us. We knew there were children out there who were probably given up (because they were blind), and we wanted to provide a home for someone like us, for someone we thought we could help."

Helping the girls, the Sprechers know, means pushing them into the world. And so they teach their daughters how to ride the CTA bus (listen carefully for each stop, they say), how to identify coins by their size and weight ("This is a dime!" says Aihua, correctly), how to sort the laundry (pin your socks together before you put them in the wash).

The Sprechers have come to realize that, in the long arc of life, success rests on a foundation of a thousand little lessons. And so, day by day, inside the cozy house with the blue shutters, lessons about dimes and socks become lessons about confidence and independence. Though she is still learning English, Aihua declares with perfect pronunciation: "I can do it!" It's a phrase that makes her parents smile.

"They're going to be functioning in the world someday," says Paula. "We try to teach the kids a routine and let go a little more and more."

CANES, CUES

Letting go isn't always so easy.

At Farnsworth Elementary School, both girls are mainstreamed in regular classes and receive help from a classroom aide and instruction in Braille. Sprecher is a teacher who works with the blind at the school, and so she is never far away.

But on a recent morning, when she popped her head into the music room to check on Aihua, she couldn't see that that her daughter who has only been in school for three months and, because of the language barrier, can't understand much of what's happening around her was in the back of the classroom, looking a little scared and hiding her face between her knees.

Paula whispered to another adult: "Where is Aihua sitting?"

She knows she can't swoop in for the rescue. Instead, she puts her trust in the teachers, who give her daily updates on the children's progress. And she puts her faith in the daily lessons.

After school, as she leads the girls toward the CTA bus stop, she pauses to ask Rupa: "What street is this?" When they reach a larger intersection, Sprecher reminds the girls to listen for the cars. And, after they get off the bus a few blocks from their house, she tells Rupa to lead the way home.

Dressed in a purple raincoat and sporting a flowered backpack, Rupa trots ahead, tapping her white cane. When she misses the right turn toward the house, her mother catches her.

"I didn't know which way to turn!" Rupa cries. But Paula replies with the confidence of someone who has been there herself. "Don't worry," she says. "You will. You're still young."

With more vision than anyone else in the family, Paula can make out shadows, shapes and colors. (She still has had her close calls crossing streets.) The girls can't see even that much Aihua has no vision at all; Rupa can only detect some light and color. They will need to rely on white canes and directional cues, such as smells from a bakery, the ring of a wind chime, a crack in the sidewalk.

The limitation shouldn't hold them back, the Sprechers say. Rupa has taken judo, sailing and ceramics. She goes to sleep-away camp every summer and participates in Girl Scouts. Aihua will have the chance to explore whatever hobbies she chooses because, as Alan says, "if they're physically able to do things, why shouldn't they?"

'SO LUCKY'

In many ways, the Sprechers want to give their daughters opportunities they never had as kids.

Alan Sprecher was sent away to school when he was just 6 years old. He spent weekdays with a foster family and returned home on weekends, because there were no educational programs for the blind close to the family's home in Baraboo, Wis.

Paula Sprecher's mother had been devastated by Paula's blindness. "She thought I would live with her until she passed away, and then I would go to a nursing home," Paula says.

After they met and married, the couple hesitated to have children. A chance encounter with a pair of nuns collecting money for overseas orphanages led them to learn about Rupa, an orphan in Bangalore, India.

"When they'd have school breaks, a lot of the children went home," says Alan, a computer programmer. "But Rupa would stay at the school and would play like she was talking to her mother and father."

"That was one of the things that struck Paula right away. And me too," he says. "They told us that this girl dreams of nothing more than having a mom and dad."

Through Catholic Charities, paperwork was filed and home visits were completed. Within a whirlwind 18 months, the Sprechers brought home the dark-haired girl who loved dolls, frilly dresses and bangle bracelets. A year later came Aihua, a tomboy who gravitates toward blocks and puzzles, and who sleeps with a yellow toy Jeep.

Now the once-quiet house is alive with the sounds of Rupa playing piano and Aihua accompanying her on tambourine.

While Alan plays with the kids, Paula makes dinner in a practiced method she calls "cooking without looking." On a recent night, she serves up Parmesan-encrusted haddock, green beans and pirogis. With a mischievous grin, Rupa tries to put her haddock on her sister's plate. Paula catches on immediately and, with motherly authority, tells her to eat her dinner.

After their baths, the girls scamper up the stairs. Both look forward to Alan's nightly reading of the children's book "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom," a rhyming story that Alan reads in Braille.

In their bedroom, Alan's voice fills the darkness as his fingers move over the page. He sits in a princess chair next to Aihua's bed. Paula climbs alongside Rupa "Who's that!?" Rupa asks. "Me," says Paula and the two cuddle close.

It's these small moments, Alan says later, that have come to mean so much.

"We're so lucky to have found these girls," Paula says.

http://www.theprovince.com/sports/Wh...793/story.html

[Vansterdam]

interesting

[Culture_Vulture]

very touching article, I'd encourage everybody to read it

[cliffhanger33]

That's really nice.

[K.Dubz]

the blind leading the blind

[invader]

lol ^