You know how there are times when you want to talk about something, acknowledge stuff, and get all this stuff off your chest, but you truly don’t even know where or how to start? That’s kind of where I’m at with our latest project. Call it a series. Call it a world. It’s our growing crew of inclusive dinosaur characters.

To do this, I feel like, despite visiting it numerous times here, I have to go back to the beginning, when Harrison was born.

Saying it was a shock is an understatement; it’s underselling it. We never had any hints, any inclinations, any suggestions that anything out of the ordinary was going on with our son. I’ve written about it before: The day of the C-section, I was a nervous mess, because Jenna wanted a clear curtain so she could see everything. That was my big worry of the day. The only thing I was nervous about. I was excited about everything else.

And… in the blink of an eye, everything got flipped and jumbled. Worrying about a clear curtain was the absolute most mundane thing that could exist. So yes, we were in shock… There are actually no words to describe what we were going through or what I felt.

After that first night of tears and fear and just a flood of the most overwhelming emotions you could imagine, Jenna and I started to morph. We started becoming the parents, the people, that we have been for the last four and a half years. No matter what is going on in our minds, in our hearts, we always try our best to not only portray calmness but to extend it to others.

Honestly, this has never been anything we’ve discussed. It’s just how we fell into place and how we learned to navigate this. It’s very much like the duck you see floating on water: calm and smooth on top, feet going crazy underneath. That is very much us. We’ve always tried to portray calmness, almost a little silliness at times, and that has thrown off many doctors, friends, and family.

The reality is, we want people to see the kid before the diagnosis. From the receptionists to the top-of-their-field specialists, that’s how we’ve always wanted things to go.

I share all that because the origins, the very beginnings of Greeney the T-Rex, came about within the first 14 days of Harrison being here.

When you have this little baby that is all curled up and tight, you’re trying to find ways to explain, to associate visuals that are not typical. To relay visuals and descriptions to people who are not in the room, especially with something so foreign, you gravitate toward commonalities and things that are familiar.

And from the very beginning, we referred to Harrison as having “T-Rex arms.” Much to the chagrin and utter speechlessness (and shock) of many people and family members. But at the time, that was the best way for us to describe it in the shortest, most concise way we could. Because as long as you stay brief and avoid getting into the weeds, you can keep a certain level of emotion at bay. And that’s what we would do. Because if you get deep into the weeds, then you get emotional, and then it just rolls downhill from there.

So at the very beginning, we talked about and would describe Harrison’s arms and hands, which were bent and tight up against him, as being T-Rex arms. We even went as far as debating if his very first Halloween costume should be a T-Rex. While not many people found that funny (I’m fairly confident we traumatized one or two people with such suggestions), we kind of did. It wasn’t that we were doing it to make light of things. We weren’t doing it to belittle our son in any way. It came from a completely unique set of thoughts and desires.

It’s one of those things. When there is a physically apparent, physically viewable disability, people tend not to know how to react. And the thing with having an infant who is physically disabled is that people are scared to touch or scared to look at them. To this day, some people are still unsure how to interact or even pick Harrison up. They avoid it. Seeing that back then, watching people with my son, so unsure, killed me. And then, something clicked. It was immediately obvious that we had to find ways to break the stigma. And in the very beginning, that was just breaking the stigma for immediate family members and the closest circles, the people that Harrison would be around.

It became very apparent that for our kid to have any semblance of just an ordinary, mundane life, we had to take everything about him that was different, that was unique, that was against the norm… and had to do everything we could to make it the norm. Rip the Band-Aid off and don’t make it a subject, don’t make it a “thing.”

The goal was for the focus to be on Harrison, not “What can Harrison do?” “What can Harrison not do?” “What is Harrison’s latest struggle?” That has never been the narrative that I’ve wanted for him. And to this point, it’s probably been more the narrative than not for many. But at the same time, there are moments where that is not the narrative, and the narrative is just Harrison… “Just Harrison” means AFOs. “Just Harrison” means an awkward gait. “Just Harrison” means talking to a kid as if he can talk back when he can’t. “Just Harrison” means he needs help grabbing something, or he can’t tell you something directly, but he finds ways to communicate. “Just Harrison” is just that: just Harrison.

And the reality is, it sucks that it has to be that way. It sucks not just for him in general, because his entire life is going to be an uphill challenge that none of us can comprehend. None of us can even fathom an inkling of it. But it’s also unfair to him because half that mountain is going to be because of society. Because of people looking at my son and being scared of him, or feeling sorry for him, or, let’s be honest, thinking much, much worse things of him and about him.

The only way around that, the only chance to make that better… As Harrison’s father, I want to give him the world. But I also want him to grow up not needing me and going beyond me. The likelihood is that my son is always going to need me. So, it is up to me to give him the world, the best possible world that I can give him. A world where people don’t fear him or look down on him or see him as someone less than.

The only way to do that is to break the stigma, to break the patterns, to bring awareness, and make the non-typical into just everyday normal. So that, yes, he may be disabled, but when he comes into a room or someone sees him, they don’t just see the disabilities. They see Harrison.

And that, all of that, is where all this started.

It started with a solitary dinosaur sketch with little T-Rex arms, just like our son was born with. A  friendly mascot, a friendly character to help bridge that gap into more awareness. To help advocate not with a hammer, but with a nostalgic joy and security that comes from cartoon characters our smallest, youngest, most inner child loved.

I have always believed you do not have to hit people over the head to express opinions or to open eyes to new possibilities. Subtle can work. Gradual can work. A steady nudge can work.

That first nudge was a T-Rex holding an ‘Unstoppable’ flag. Our Greeney, finally making it onto a shirt to help bring just a touch more awareness to AMC.

It was a beginning that took four years to get started.

But once we started with Greeney, the ball started rolling. I always knew I wanted to expand beyond just a T-Rex. Even before I got that first design out, I knew, but I struggled. I struggled to find these new characters and the what, how, and why of what they could represent. I knew I wanted to separate things out and not make one character basically a mirror representation of Harrison and all his conditions, but to spread out his different disabilities and conditions to other characters to help bring focus and awareness to each individual piece. And while that sounds simple enough, I struggled. It was the equivalent of writer’s block.

I had inklings of ideas. I knew I wanted to do a triceratops next, and a brontosaurus. I even had both sketched out initially, matching the same vintage-mascot style I started Greeney with. The only problem was that they felt flat. They weren’t fitting.

Then thoughts shifted, and once you find a path, once you catch even the smallest groove, the momentum builds. That’s what happened here with this entire crew. The pieces started falling into place, and the more we did, the quicker ideas came, like a ball picking up speed down a mountain.

That first piece: October being AAC Awareness Month. That’s what actually pushed me forward. Harrison uses an AAC device, and so do other kids right here in our community. The point stopped being ‘mirror Harrison’ and started being ‘reflect the many.’

Because the reality is, yeah, this started with Harrison. But I can’t build a world aroundHarrison. If I want a world where people just see Harrison, then that also means it’s a world where people just see Watson. They just see Henry. They just see kids. Just kids as kids, and the absolute beauty of that. And something that has been so incredibly just awe-inspiring is the fact that kids just see other kids.

So while I love every character that we have made so far, and I am proud of not only bringing light but bringing awareness for more than just my son, I’m going to be completely honest. To me, the most important characters that we have made, that tie it all together and make it into something, are the friends. Daisy and Thomas. They are the representation of not only remarkable children who have incredible hearts and souls, but also children who represent the absolute best that humanity has to offer.

As cliché as that sounds, it’s the truth. And not only that, they represent the foundation of the world that I want for all these kids and for everyone who not only has a visible disability but, in one way or another, is different and born different and can be viewed differently.

That’s why Daisy and Thomas matter so much to me. They’re the friends who make room, ask questions, and stick around. Inclusion isn’t a spotlight; it’s a circle, and right now our circle looks like this: eight characters live, ten are fully designed, and number eleven is sketched out. That ball has a long way to go before it hits the bottom of the mountain.

Yeah, when I started this, I didn’t plan for it to become this group of characters that can bring about awareness and can advocate and help draw attention to inclusiveness. I mean, you’re talking to a complete introvert who married another introvert. Yes, we each have our own lanes and do all these different things, but at our core, total introverts. Yet here we are. We are, in a way (stealing a line from Jenna), “reluctantly advocating.”

But it’s not just reluctantly advocating because we need to, because we do. Now, it’s reluctantly advocating because we want to.

The best surprise so far? Parents have started sharing more openly about gear, therapy, devices, and more, because a cartoon dino made the first move for them. If a character can break the ice, maybe the rest gets easier.

And at the end of the day, I can finally put to use all those hundreds of half-drawn pictures that I used to leave lying around as a kid, that to this day, Mom has no problem telling you about if you talk to her.

This has been a long time coming. The ball’s still near the top of the mountain. If there’s a device, brace, or story we’re not showing yet, tell me – let’s add it. This is just the beginning.