Hasta La Gadget!

Every year, many kids who celebrate Easter look forward to hunting for eggs filled with money, candy or other treats. For kids with disabilities, this fun and festive activity is not always possible, but people across the country are working to change that. Here, three people share how they’re making Easter egg hunts more inclusive. 

Meet the mom who’s creating an Easter egg hunt for her son with autism and other kids like him:

On April 15, Sara Flynn-Reed and her friend Amy Anderson-Gibbons will hold an Easter egg hunt for kids with disabilities in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The two moms met at an event about autism, bonded over their children’s autism diagnoses and quickly became friends. 

For their egg hunt, Flynn-Reed and Anderson-Gibbons are dedicated to making the event not just fun, but inclusive. One of the most interesting parts of their hunt includes magnetic eggs that kids with physical disabilities can reach easily with help from craft sticks with a magnet on the end.

Flynn-Reed’s son, Parker, was 6 years old when he was diagnosed with autism. She told The Huffington Post that her community has few activities accessible for children with disabilities where “the kids can be kids,” which motivated her to organize a different sort of Easter egg hunt for her son and other kids like him.

Flynn-Reed told HuffPost that after she posted a video of the magnetic eggs in action she received a lot of positive feedback from grateful parents in her community.

“I have had several parents of physically disabled children tell me that this will be the first time that their child will be able to hunt eggs,” she said.

During the event, kids with physical disabilities and kids who are blind will have their own hunt, which will be followed by a hunt for kids with severe sensory issues. The “open hunt,” as Flynn-Reed described it, then begins for everyone else. There will be a “calming room” for participants who might be overwhelmed with the celebration, and kids who can’t eat candy because of allergies will be able to trade their treats in for a stuffed animal.

Flynn-Reed told HuffPost that she and Anderson-Gibbons plan “to make Easter as fun as possible” for their community, including its residents with disabilities.

Meet the dad who helps bring beeping Easter eggs to kids who are blind:

For 11 years, Alabama father David Hyche has been making egg hunts accessible for many kids across the country who are blind. He’s made headlines over the years for the beeping Easter eggs he created for his daughter, Rachel, who is blind.

Hyche, an ATF agent, told HuffPost he uses an electronic switch, a battery and a beeper to help the eggs make a “pulsing beeping sound.” He learned how to make them after getting in touch with the Blind Children’s Center in Los Angeles, which also makes the beeping eggs, and slightly changed the design to make the creation process less expensive.

He first created the eggs when Rachel, who is now 12, was a little more than a year old so she could participate in a church Easter egg hunt and continued making them on his own in his garage for a few years.

The International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators, of which Hyche is a member, has since taken on the project as its charitable endeavor. Members across the country make the eggs to give to groups and communities hoping to make their Easter events more inclusive.

“Anything that’s special needs they jack the price up on,” Hyche said. “I’m glad we’re able to make them and not charge anyone because they’re overpriced if people try to buy them.”

Meet the teacher who wants to provide more resources for adults with autism and raise awareness:

Residents of Milford, Ohio, will also have access to a sensory friendly Easter egg hunt. On April 15, All in for Autism, an organization focused on finding opportunities for adults with autism, will host a hunt at a township park in Milford. Matt Sampsel, co-founder and director of the organization, told HuffPost the event will include “quiet tents” and will not include music. The hunt will also be broken down into three ability levels, not age levels. 

“We’re trying to break it up based on capabilities, based on what the participants are actually able to find,” Sampsel told HuffPost.

For 10 years, Sampsel has taught at a school for individuals with autism. Most of his experience there has been with people who are 16 to 18 years old. His students sparked the idea for All in for Autism, which he is hoping will be officially Medicaid approved and will have a physical location next year. His time spent teaching has made him realize the lack of resources for adults with autism.

“That’s really opened my eyes up to what the adult services look like,” he told HuffPost. “I didn’t see anything filling my students’ needs as they aged out of the program.”

As of Thursday afternoon, 39 participants have registered for the event, which is open to all ages. The oldest participant so far is 18 years old. 

Sampsel has also made sure the Easter bunny at the hunt has the background needed to entertain and interact with guests. The man who will wear the costume is a substitute aid at the school where Sampsel teaches and is also a firefighter.

Sampsel hopes the details he’s kept in mind for the Easter egg hunt will raise awareness for autism and inform others about what it means to have the disorder. He also wants all the participants to enjoy themselves in a sensory friendly environment.

“That is our primary focus,” he said.

The HuffPost Parents newsletter, So You Want To Raise A Feminist, offers the latest stories and news in progressive parenting.

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WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump on Thursday repealed a regulation issued by his predecessor that would have helped low-wage workers save money in government-sponsored retirement plans.

Before he left office, President Barack Obama finalized a rule meant to clear the legal hurdles facing cities and counties that want to establish what are known as auto-IRA accounts. Private-sector workers who have no employer-sponsored retirement plans would be automatically enrolled in such accounts unless they choose not to be.

The Obama administration said that creating a path for more auto-IRA plans would help reduce the number of workers ― many of them low-income ― who aren’t remotely prepared for retirement. The rule would have clarified that local, government-sponsored auto-IRAs do not conflict with the strict federal laws covering pension and retirement plans.

Although the conservative Heritage Foundation was an early supporter of the auto-IRA concept, Republicans in Congress didn’t seem to like it when Obama took up the cause. Last month, they used an arcane tool known as the Congressional Review Act to overturn the regulation in a 50-49 Senate vote, sending the repeal to Trump’s desk. On Thursday, the White House announced in a press release that Trump had signed it.

Republicans typically bristle at Washington meddling in local affairs, but in this case they essentially voted to keep obstacles in front of localities that want to pursue their own auto-IRA plans, such as Seattle, New York and Philadelphia. Of course, government-sponsored plans would compete with the retirement plans offered by banks, and Republicans claimed the Obama rules put the private sector at a disadvantage.  

An estimated 55 million U.S. workers currently have no employer-sponsored retirement plan, and most of them are at the lower end of the income scale. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and other city officials warned in a joint statement that women and people of color would be disproportionately harmed by the repeal of the Obama rule.

Congress may also kill a similar Obama rule applying to state-run IRA plans, though a number of states are pushing back against that repeal effort.  

Republicans have gone after more than 30 regulations using what are known as “resolutions of disapproval” under the Congressional Review Act. The law allows Congress to nullify rules that were finalized late in the previous presidency, such as the rule regarding auto-IRAs. The resolutions only need a simple majority to pass in the Senate, rendering a Democratic filibuster moot.

So far, Trump has signed 12 of the repeals that Republicans have sent his way. Together they have killed two other labor-related regulations ― one that had made it harder for employers to hide worker injuries from the government, and another that would have made it harder for companies to secure federal contracts if they have a history of labor law violations.

Republicans have also killed a slew of regulations related to gun control, stream pollution and internet privacy.

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If you’re looking for the perfect pair of pants to show off your entire bum, this design house has just the jeans for you. 

Vetements, a haute-streetwear collective, recently introduced a less-than-practical line of jeans from a collaboration with Levi’s. Available in a few different styles ― including corduroy― the pants are a patchwork of different shades and uncomfortably placed zippers.

The zippers actually work, which means you (or someone else) can unzip the pants, revealing whatever you do or don’t have on underneath. You’d think for the outrageous $1,715 price tag, one could expect some more coverage. (And it’s even steeper for a corduroy version, pricing in at $1,985.)

Butt Vete-a-minute ― if pants without bottoms aren’t quite your thing, why not just buy assless chaps? A pair available at Walmart will only set you back around $70. 

The pants are sold out at Nordstrom, but if you’re still in the market, Net-A-Porter still has some of the zip-detailed high-rise jeans (and the corduroy version!) left:

The HuffPost Lifestyle newsletter will make you happier and healthier, one email at a time. Sign up here. 

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Former Olympian ice skater Nancy Kerrigan showed her courage this week by revealing on “Dancing with the Stars” that she had six miscarriages while trying to build her family.

Kerrigan, competing on the current season of DWTS, joins a not-very-exclusive club: Healthy women have an average 15 to 20 percent chance of having a miscarriage, according to the American Pregnancy Association. Among women who have already had one miscarriage, that likelihood goes up to 25 percent.

Miscarriages are much more common than most people realize, but because we don’t talk about them openly, women can feel alone and ashamed when they experience one.

“The first time that you go in and they tell you, ‘Oh there’s no heartbeat,’ it’s devastating,” Kerrigan, a two-time Olympic medalist, said in an interview segment before her dance sequence. “It almost felt shameful, because I couldn’t do it on my own.”

The 47-year-old mother of three said that her miscarriages left her feeling like a “failure.”

“Since I was 10 years old, I always wanted to have three kids by the time I was 30, sort of like what my mom had done,” she added.

When celebrities like Kerrigan come forward and discuss their miscarriages, it can help ameliorate some of the shame and blame some women feel after the experience. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan were praised as well for speaking openly about the three miscarriages that preceded their first successful pregnancy.

Miscarriage scientist Dr. Zev Williams, who directs the Program for Early and Recurrent Pregnancy Loss at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Montefiore Medical Center in New York, studied 1,000 women and their partners who had experienced miscarriages. Forty-seven percent said they felt guilty, 41 percent said they felt they did something wrong, 38 percent felt they could have prevented the miscarriage somehow and 28 percent reported feelings of shame about their miscarriages.

Because of these misguided but common feelings, the subject still regrettably remains taboo, Williams said.

This shame can be implicit in common cultural practices. Many doctors still advise women not to announce their pregnancies before 12 weeks because they believe their patients will be embarrassed if they have to let family and friends know that they miscarried. And the belief that miscarriages are somehow caused by a woman’s negative lifestyle choices remains pervasive.

Kerrigan didn’t open up about when her miscarriages occurred. But according to the USC Fertility Center, it’s uncommon to have multiple miscarriages in a row ― just 2 percent of pregnant women experience consecutive two pregnancy losses in a row, and only about 1 percent have three.

Still, most women who experience recurrent miscarriages have “a good chance of eventually having a successful pregnancy,” the center says.

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As the Trump administration lurches from failure to incompetence to disaster and back again, it’s important to keep pointing out that there is progress still happening in this country—it’s just not originating from Congress or the White House. And a lot of the best news continues to be about renewable energy—and I don’t just mean last week’s revelation that the Kentucky Coal Museum has installed 80 solar panels on its roof to lower its electric bill.

A more significant solar milestone reported this week is that for a few hours on March 11 utility-scale solar power met roughly half of the electricity needs of the grid that supplies electricity to 80 percent of California and part of Nevada. That’s kind of amazing when you consider that California’s current goal is to get half of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. Seems like a clear opportunity to both raise California’s goal and accelerate the timeline, no?

The other exciting clean energy news from the past week came from two great American cities: Chicago and Portland, Oregon. On Sunday, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that the Windy City would transition all of its municipal buildings and operations to 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2025. That currently makes Chicago’s the largest fleet of public buildings in the country to commit to clean energy. It’s a doubly sweet victory because the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign traces some of its (grass)roots to the struggle to close Chicago’s notorious Fisk and Crawford coal plants, which were finally retired in 2012.

One day after Chicago’s announcement, Portland mayor Ted Wheeler and Multnomah County commissioner Jessica Vega-Pederson announced a new plan for transitioning the City of Roses to 100 percent clean energy by 2050. Once approved by the city and county commissioners, the plan will make Portland the largest city in the country to commit to transition all energy sectors to 100 percent clean energy (San Diego, which is larger, has so far committed to 100 percent clean electricity).

Portland and Chicago are not alone, of course. Around the country, cities are moving full speed ahead by setting ambitious goals and taking actions to reduce carbon emissions. Although it’s tempting to see this as a natural response to federal inaction and rollback on climate change, the trend started long before Trump’s election. The real reason municipal governments are taking the lead on clean energy is because it’s so much better for the people who live in those cities: It’s healthier, it costs less, it creates better jobs, and it makes cities more livable. What’s not to like?

The Republican Congress and the Trump administration seem to agree on just one thing: walking America backward. And though their current majority means we must fight every attempted rollback with unflagging persistence and determination, we must press forward with our inclusive vision of 100 percent clean energy that works for all. Trump and friends can’t keep us from taking two (or 200!) steps forward for every step that they retreat. And when it comes to renewable energy, those steps are more like a sprint. Every day seems to bring news of more progress, whether it’s from cities, counties, states… or coal museums.  

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