1KHO 945: Lessons from 45 Years of Raising a Child with Special Needs | Dr. Joe and Cindi Ferrini, The Special Needs Parent

Ginny Yurich (0:01)

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I'm the founder of 1000Hours Outside. And I'm so honored and excited to bring you today's guests, husband and wife, Dr. Joe and Cindy Ferrini. They are the authors of The Special Needs Parent, A Guide to the Life You Never Expected. Welcome to the both of you.

Joe Ferrini (2:17)

Thank you so much. Good to be here.

Ginny Yurich (2:19)

This is an incredible resource and actually I've been asked about this numerous times. I had a special needs mom named Christy Cook a while ago. She has a company called Accessible Adventures and they are taking their kids all over the place and sharing where they're going, how they're doing it and things to consider. Like what if the child needs to be changed?

Is there a changing room for them as they get older? Things like that. And so it was an honor to get a chance to talk with her. And so your book came through and I was like, oh, people ask about this all the time. And I'm thrilled to be able to have a conversation with you and share the resources that you have for parents. So this book is called The Special Needs Parent and you have a Facebook page called The Unexpected Journey. I'll make sure I'll put all the links in the show notes. Could you give us a little bit of your background? Tell us about your family. You've got three amazing kids.

Cindy Ferrini (3:06)

We do have three amazing kids. Thanks. Thanks for saying that. Yes, we do. So Joe and I have been married almost 47 years and our oldest is Joey. Joey is going to be 45 very soon. He is Special Needs. He has cerebral palsy, controlled epilepsy, a number of other situations in terms of delayed learning. His speech is very low.

I always forget something. What about he's six foot four?

We put that in partly for his disability, because parents with kids with special needs will understand, you can't put a six foot four kid adult into a corner and say, we'll be back in a minute for your timeout. It's just one of the things that really does truly add to his disability in terms of helping him get around and that sort of thing even though he is mobile. Did I forget anything?

Joe Ferrini (4:03)

Yeah, that's great.

Cindy Ferrini (4:04)

Oh, okay.

I win today. Okay, so and then we have two daughters that live nearby us and they each have children.

The older of the two girls is Christina and she has two boys that are teenagers and then she does foster care. So she has just a bunch of little people running through her home here, there and everywhere. And then Kathleen is the youngest of our three children. She's almost six years younger than Christina. And she has two, well, she has three children. And if our words are slurred at all, it's because we just had them for three days. And they are ages, they are ages six and a half, five, and almost three in a month. And we woke up a little sore today. But to the point of your podcast, we had them outside a lot, didn't we?