Frankie's World

"I interviewed a woman who both works at a medical day care and has a daughter who attends it as well. She provides a unique perspective of raising a child with complex medical needs. Throughout our interview, one thing that she continuously brought up was a home. She had two kids by the age of 18 and by her own own words was not, "taking life seriously" at the time. With the birth of her daughter extremely prematurely came the purchase of a home she had been saving up for. While her daughter spent 9 months in the NICU until she was stable enough to be brought home, her mom prepared this home for her. She told me without this house, she would not be able to bring her daughter home. She said this experience was a huge turning point in her life and would not have been possible without the house. As I have been working with kids for BTG and spending lots of time doing activities and crafts with them, I chose to draw this house in the stereotypical child's fashion, on construction paper with crayons. The colors are inverted because I've noticed oftentimes kids don't care about what color the sun is when they are drawing. "

My site for the summer was Frankie's World, which is a medical daycare, one of the first in the country. This place truly is a different world. A world where everyone is treated with kindness, respect and love, regardless of their abilities. The staff is trained to offer care for complex medical conditions, but the kids here are never told they are sick. They are never told they cannot do an activity, play a game or be with their friends. Frankie's world is a place where everyone is accepted for who they are and it gives me hope to see how we, as a society, could treat people who are different from us.

The person I interviewed oversees all the staff at Frankie's world, anyone someone is missing, whether a nurse or a teacher, she covers for them and know s every detail about every child that is in her care. For my storytelling project, I decided to create an artwork to represent her qualities. I used multiple sets of eyes to represent her attention being pulled in many directions, the pom-poms represent her softness towards the kids, the paperclips symbolize how protective she is and the word written on the page are some of her many qualities.