Wishing everyone a very happy 4th of July. As we celebrate this day of independence, we find ourselves in a very different country than we have ever experienced in the past. No matter what your political affiliation is, it is important to remember that we are not the Republican States of America, the Democrat States of America or even the Independent States of America, we are the United States of America. From the early days of the revolution to gain our independence, we have always been a nation of forward thinking people… Read More

My friend Tim always finds the best sayings and this one he posted yesterday gave me the inspiration for today’s post.  “My goal is to build a life that I don’t need a vacation from”.  Wow!  This got me to thinking about life as a whole and just what kind of life we strive to live? We all make choices in the different components that make up our life as a whole. The work we choose, the friends we have, the activities we choose to do and the people we select to… Read More

One of the most beautiful things about true friendship is that you are able to be yourself in a safe environment without judgement or consequences. This includes both good and bad situations that may happen in our every day life. Never was that more evident for me than with three of my friends over the past week. I have mentioned in the past that I love the game of Mah Jongg. I learned to play about a year and half ago, play in several groups regularly and whenever I have the opportunity… Read More

  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