As Down Syndrome Awareness Month comes to a close, I’d like to highlight the four “Perfectly Human” posts that have focused upon relationships with individuals with Down syndrome. There’s much work to be done on behalf of people with Down syndrome–advocacy, medical research, educational advances. And yet the work that seems most significant to me is not done on behalf of these individuals but with them. Change happens through public policy, but it starts with relationships. A doctor who knows a child with Down syndrome uses different words to share a diagnosis of Trisomy 21 than a doctor who understands Downs only as a medical problem. A teenager who is friends with a person with Down syndrome thinks twice before using the word “retard” to joke with a friend. Stories of life, in all its messy, beautiful, idiosyncratic, challenging, rewarding reality can change the world. And so I refer again to these four stories, as a tribute to the hundreds of thousands of individuals with Down syndrome who populate our world and make it a better place: