Mari Walker

The meme about Schrodinger’s virus speaks to me. We don’t know if we have COVID-19 at any given time, but we have to act as if we do while interacting with others to keep them safe. And we have to act as if we don’t have COVID-19 to remember to take steps to mitigate our own risk of becoming infected.  Without robust testing, it doesn’t seem like we can ever get the virus under control. Our area has seen such spikes that Baton Rouge was chosen as a site for federal surge testing for a couple weeks. And I took advantage of the site nearest to me and was tested last week. My reasoning for getting tested was partly that it felt like the right thing to do. (And I’m a sucker for free stuff, let me tell you!) But the more pressing desire to be tested was a possible exposure. Read the rest on Baton Rouge Parents Magazine's website .

After the birth of her second daughter, Gracie, on April 2, Stephanie Melancon had two days at home with her family of four before their lives turned upside down. “Stephanie started feeling bad, and by that evening, she could hardly walk. She had a 104.8 fever,” says Mike Melancon, Stephanie’s husband. At the direction of her doctor, Mike rushed Stephanie back to Woman’s Hospital. Stephanie was initially diagnosed with viral pneumonia and a few days later tested positive for COVID-19. She ended up spending 52 days at Woman’s, experiencing a number of setbacks during her recovery, including a cardiac arrest and about six weeks on a ventilator. A tracheostomy was performed to help wean her off the ventilator, and Stephanie received a passy muir valve to allow her to speak. She was kept in a medically induced coma for much of her stay at Woman’s and experiences short-term memory loss from the sedation. “It was pretty bad for a while,” Mike says. “Every day she would poi...

Everyone needs clean water, but not all of us think about what it takes to have that access. Rylan Carruth, 12, does, and he’s active in sharing ways to get involved and ensure Baton Rouge’s drinking water stays as great as it is. When he first learned about the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and the Save Our Water campaign, he took action and got involved. His advocacy has led him to speak with Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome and her Youth Advisory Council, present at a meeting of the Metro Council, and meet with Robert Kennedy as part of Riverkeepers Alliance. “I don’t consider myself an activist,” Rylan says. “I think we should have clean air and water, and I think corporations should be good neighbors.” Along with older brothers Liam and Adam, Rylan says their environmentally conscious family has always reduced, reused and recycled as much as possible. A seventh grader at University Laboratory School, Rylan is applying his mindset to improving his sc...

As Education and Community sections editor, I wrote pages 16-23 and page 26 of the July 2020 issue of Baton Rouge Parents magazine. See the web layout on the magazine's website .

We may be “over” coronavirus, but it’s clear this pandemic is not over for us. Summer has looked a lot different for our family, and we’re certainly living a smaller life. I wouldn’t have called us an on-the-go, big-life family necessarily, but in hindsight, we definitely were! Last summer, my now-eight-year-old attended her first sleepaway camp with the Girl Scouts . We took a trip to the beach with my in-laws . Other day camps and church events were consistently on our calendar last year. Regular trips to the library for summer reading activities and overflowing bags of checked-out books have been features of every summer of my girls’ childhoods. Until now. Read the rest on Baton Rouge Parents magazine's website.

I haven’t been able to write a post for this blog in more than a month . I could blame being busy–I have taken on a temporarily bigger volunteer role with my church (ask me about video editing or live streaming!)–but that’s not it, or at least not entirely. Writing is normally my oxygen.  For blogging, I typically turn to my life and my daughters’ lives, but there’s much less to mine from life right now. Because of the pandemic, my family and I are living a much smaller life. Read the rest on Baton Rouge Parents Magazine's website .

For 21-year-old Grace Graugnard, hearing limitations never registered when she was a child, even though she wore hearing aids and eventually received cochlear implants. “I knew I was different and had to do some things differently,” she says. One of those things was taking speech therapy instead of P.E. “As a kid, I wanted to play dodgeball and not go sit in the classroom.” The time spent in speech therapy paid off for Grace, who majors in theater and international relations at Tulane University and applies those lessons to learning new accents for roles. Grace remembers noticing her hearing limitations when she was listening to the High School Musical soundtrack as her mom tried to explain the difference between harmony and melody. Grace just couldn’t hear the notes. “I think that’s where I was like, OK, something’s up.” Read the rest on Baton Rouge Parents magazine's website.