Category: Sponsored

Keeping Morale High During National Have Fun at Work Day

I’ve heard it said that all work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

My name may not be Jack but I’m pretty sure I know how he feels.

The world of community mental health can be a scary one at times. My coworkers and I are often bogged down in talk of DSM diagnoses, difficult behaviors and challenging family situations.1 Our clients and their families are struggling with the most serious issues, including physical aggression, hallucinations and suicidality. We have to find ways to help our clients cope with these conditions, as well as teach their family members how to encourage their children’s development. We find success at different points along the way but the high points come along a lot less frequently than any of us would like.

Believe it or not, though, I still enjoy going to work. Continue reading “Keeping Morale High During National Have Fun at Work Day”

Through the Looking Glass: a Visit to the Corning Museum of Glass

My family and I were hosted by the Corning Museum of Glass for a visit in August. We received complimentary admission and passes to create our own glass sculptures. As always, the views expressed here are my own.

I’ve worn glasses since I was five years old.

My first few pairs were thick, dark brown frames that somehow managed to disguise the Coke-bottle thickness of the lenses they held inside. They were the polar opposite of fashionable, though I cared very little about such things back then. The important thing was that I could see the chalkboard, my friends and, one time, the brick wall on the playground just a fraction of a second before I slammed into it at top speed. Continue reading “Through the Looking Glass: a Visit to the Corning Museum of Glass”

Supporting the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals With General Mills and Costco

This post is sponsored by General Mills but, as always, all thoughts and opinions are my own.

It’s now been almost a full month since my daughter, S, had her surgery to repair an epigastric hernia.

The Cohen’s Children’s Medical Center staff thought of everything. The nurses reminded us not to eat or drink in the pre-op waiting room because the patients there aren’t allowed to either. The child life specialist made sure that S had Play-Doh, stuffed animals, cars and as many other toys as they could provide in order to make sure S stayed in a good mood. The child life team sat with her while the doctor and anesthesiologist spoke with us and walked us through the entire procedure. The anesthesiologist offered to place a flavored scent into the anesthesia to make it more tolerable for S to breathe in (she chose strawberry). S was also given the option to look at pictures of the operating room before going in to help the environment feel more familiar once she got inside. She was pushed into the OR in style, riding in a Step2 play push-car and beeping the horn the entire way. My wife also told me that she was able to hold S on her lap while they administered the anesthesia, which I thought was unbelievable. Continue reading “Supporting the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals With General Mills and Costco”

Keeping Our Kids Safe Online With Bark

I recently became an ambassador for Bark, an app that helps parents monitor their children’s online activity. You can find my discount code here and at the bottom of the post. Still, as always, all opinions here are my own.

I began working with Kayla1 and her family when she was fourteen years old.

She was a lovely young woman. She had a sharp sense of humor, knew how to take constructive criticism (from me, at least) and was self-aware enough to offer her own insights about the sources of her depressive symptoms. She was open about her relationships, both social and romantic, and seemed to genuinely enjoy asking my opinions about the choices she faced on a daily basis. She didn’t always take my advice – what teenager would? – but she always listened. Continue reading “Keeping Our Kids Safe Online With Bark”

Make Your Voice Heard With Rock the Vote

I blushed when she asked the question.

It was my first semester of graduate school and I was sitting in a class devoted to theories of human behavior. It was later in the semester and we had covered a number of different theories. Each theory used a different approach and focused on a different aspect of people’s lives, from the ways infants develop attachments to adults’ desires for self-determination to the ways that people perceive reality in general. It was my favorite class of the two years I spent working toward my degree, rivaled only by the more informal discussions of philosophies and their impacts on social work practice during my independent studies.

On that day, a classmate had raised his hand. He was confused about the goal of our studies. He was struggling to understand how we, as budding social workers, were supposed to use all of these different and, sometimes, contradictory theories during our work with clients. Continue reading “Make Your Voice Heard With Rock the Vote”

Keeping Safety 1st During Late Night Baseball

The text message popped up on my phone just after midnight.

T was trying to fall asleep in our bedroom and I was on the couch in the living room. The Cubs and Rockies had just gone into extra innings in their win-or-go-home playoff game and I didn’t want to disturb my exhausted wife by reacting to key pitches or controversial calls. I was exhausted too, of course; caffeine only works for so long and my energy stores had already been low after a frustrating day at work. Sports fandom being what it is, though, I was determined to see the game through for as long as I could keep my eyes open.

I had been alone for maybe ten minutes when the soft glow of my cell phone caught my eye. I picked it up, expecting to see another message from my friend with whom I’d been texting during the game, but it wasn’t from him. It was from T. Continue reading “Keeping Safety 1st During Late Night Baseball”

Paid Paternity Leave and #DearFutureDads

A coworker and I were speaking recently about children. He doesn’t have any kids himself but he would like to one day. He mentioned that he struggles with anxiety, though, and that he worries about how that would manifest in his parenting. He asked me how T and I deal with the anxiety that comes with raising our kids.

“That’s why God made bourbon,” I answered with a grin.

Continue reading “Paid Paternity Leave and #DearFutureDads”

Lego Star Wars and #RoarForChange

“Is Chewbacca going to be there?” he asked, his eyes wide with expectation.

I smiled and shrugged my shoulders.

“We’ll have to wait and see,” I said with a wink.

He smiled back but didn’t ask again. I could tell that he knew to expect to meet the large Wookiee from Star Wars but he was apparently content to let some degree of suspense continue to build.

We held E out of school on Friday. It was May 4th, the unofficial holiday of the Star Wars movie franchise1 and I’d received an invitation to attend an event in Manhattan with Lego and Star Wars. I didn’t give E much more information than that – partially because I wasn’t sure what to expect – but he didn’t ask for much more. He knew that he wasn’t going to school and that he was coming into the city for a special trip with me and that was enough. Continue reading “Lego Star Wars and #RoarForChange”

Putting the Pieces Together

It’s probably an overstatement to say that I loved playing with Legos when I was a kid.1I enjoyed them, to be sure, and I wished at the time that I had more models. I would open the outer package, dump all of the tiny bricks together into the inner box and start building. My eyes would bounce back and forth like tennis balls from the instruction booklet to the box of bricks to find the pieces I needed and back again to complete each step. I would pore over the instructions, making absolutely sure that I had placed the pieces correctly before pressing them together. I would sit, sometimes for hours on end, constructing airplanes, medieval castles and woodland fortresses.

But then I would leave them alone.  Continue reading “Putting the Pieces Together”

RAD Girl Revolution

“You can’t be what you can’t see.”

That’s the slogan for RAD Girl Revolution, a new children’s book created by two mothers from my neighborhood, Sharita Manickam and Jennifer Bruno. Like many modern parents, they were disappointed with traditional portrayals of gender roles in children’s books. It wasn’t just the “knight in shining armor” and “damsel in distress” tales that concerned them; it was the idea that astronauts, fire fighters, business people and a host of other professions were almost always characterized as men. Despite the increasing prevalence of girls empowerment programs across the country and a rising presence of similar slogans on clothing targeted to young girls, Manickam and Bruno kept coming back to the same bottom line: if girls couldn’t point to women in specific roles in society, they would have a much more difficult time visualizing themselves in such a position.  Continue reading “RAD Girl Revolution”

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