What do you do when you complete a successful campaign?  Well, you start another one of course. Our recent “Smiling 50” campaign was a smash success.  Because of our wonderful card and postage donors, we were able to deliver cards to senior communities in all 50 states!  Now that we have that one under our belt, we are pleased to announce our next campaign, “Random Acts of Smiling”. Were going to cross all 50 states again but this time in reverse order.  We will randomly select a senior community and deliver… Read More

I thought I would end this week on a lighthearted note with a story that everyone who has ever had a cat will understand.  Cat’s have their own unique individual personality. They have this way of making sure that they let us know regularly that they are the ones in control of the house, not us. Our cat Moochie recently turned fourteen and has inflammatory bowel disease for which he takes prednisone every other day. This seems to have everything under control, but the medicine has increased his appetite and this makes… Read More

Do you ever have those days when no matter how hard you try for a period of time you are just sad and somber? You can’t seem to break out of it and then just like that in a flash it just moves on. Sometimes you can’t really pinpoint the reason for it and there are times when the reason is obvious, but it seems to come and go at a whim. For me that seems to happen about once every 4-6 weeks.  For about a two day period I wake up… Read More

One thing for certain in the Bring Smiles to Seniors program is that we get to be around Seniors….a lot! That is one of the things that I love most about what we do. In the early months of the program we were able to deliver cards to residents individually and that resulted in us being able to see seniors in a variety of living situations and having many interactions with people. One thing we learned early on was that we should never take a negative interaction personally and that dealing with seniors… Read More

Do you ever feel sometimes in life that you have set goals, made plans, created tasks and no matter how hard you try you just can’t quite seem to get there? Despite persistence and perseverance, completing the list just seems like it is out of reach. You may finish some, but your list of “to do” items for yourself just never seems to get finished. Now assume you take that same list and review it with a different approach. If you were to give that list to someone you knew and they… Read More

Anyone who has ever dealt with a patient with Alzheimer’s or Dementia will understand the title of this post immediately. One of the hardest things we are faced with is when our visits to our loved ones result in our becoming less and less known to them. Who we are to them begins to change until you finally reach the point where the identity as we know it no longer exists. When my grandmother first went into the nursing home, everything was fine in terms of her knowing who I was. On… Read More

Because we have some blog followers that are not connected to our Facebook page (facebook.com/bringsmilestoseniors), I wanted to provide you an update on our recent “Smiling 50” Campaign. A couple months ago we set out to deliver cards to at least one senior community in all 50 states. We were already delivering to 14 states, so we had 36 states to go.  On June 19th, we successfully completed this campaign when we delivered the last box of cards to Wyoming. In the process we delivered to 38 senior communities in 36 states… Read More

Sometimes it is later in life when you truly understand the sacrifices that your parents made so that you could have a better life. The selflessness that my parents showed so that we did not have to go without is something that I think about all the time. Growing up both my mom and dad worked to ensure that the family was taken care of. We didn’t have a lot of money, but they managed to make sure that we had a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs.  As… Read More

This weekend when I was home for Father’s Day, as I usually do I stopped by the cemetery to pay respects to Grandma Lola. There is something calming about having one on one time there, even though the person isn’t in front of you. This visit and a prompting from my friend Kim last week reminded me of something that I wanted to share. As my mother well knows, one of the hardest things in dealing with people who have dementia is when you come to the point where their reality is… Read More

Well – I was attempting to set up my post for tomorrow morning a little early and wound up accidentally publishing it. So, enjoy Monday morning’s post on Sunday this week :-). Ron