Stickers!

It is always amazing to me what a little piece of sticky paper can do to help make someone feel better. In my office we give many stickers away for kids who are brave (or not) during their shots. Kids who are good while their siblings are being seen. Occasionally, I have given stickers to my favorite Down Syndrome patient because she likes them almost as much as chocolate which I don't always have on hand.

I have denied stickers as well. For the kid whose mom wanted him to have a sticker even though he refused to listen or follow through on any of her requests, I said "no".

I like stickers myself and actually had many a sticker book in elementary and even middle school of various shapes, color, puffiness and smell. We had to stop getting the scratch and sniff ones because my staff and I would scratch all the smell out of them before they were a day old.

I am often looking through our collection commenting on the stickers we should be purchasing. "We need some princess stickers", I would say and be more excited than the kids when they arrived.

But by far my favorite sticker memory will be today.

An 80 year old man cut his forearm with a rusty nail on a birdhouse. Not much damage done but who knows when the last tetanus shot was so he came in to satisfy his wife. He didn't move an inch and complimented my medical assistant on her injection savvy. "You did great! I didn't feel a thing!"

I was telling his wife that earlier that day a mom had promised ice cream to her child when he only barely jerked his arm completely out of the way when he was getting his shot. I suggested maybe her husband could use an ice cream on the way home and we giggled.

Then I turned to the husband and asked if he would like a sticker. "Oh, sure!"

Let's see what we have........Superman, Madagascar, Shark Tales, Horses, Dogs, My Little Ponies.....

"Yup, that's the one!"

And he walked away with a beautiful purple My Little Pony sticker - his badge of honor for his tetanus shot and bird house adventure.

Virtual Interaction

I am beginning to realize that I am terribly out of touch with the way that communication occurs these days. I have no my space page but I DO have a few blogs that I posted for the sole purpose of having an easy place to share pics with my family without them having to join shutterfly or snapfish and an email account. I talk with my sister-in-law Jen more than often than not over the text messaging feature on my Treo. I am sitting here with my husband on a lazy Sunday afternoon after we have been off doing different things all weekend and we are both glued to our laptops in a house where we have more computers than people.

It is a bit disturbing to me that we have become a nation that interacts through electronic media preferentially to visiting with our neighbors next door. We virtual date rather than go out looking for people in person. We text all day long instead of talking with or meeting face to face. And now the My Space Age. My large extended family has become more easily accessible by computer than by visit I have discovered recently. Family I haven't seen or had the chance to talk any more than a couple of sentences to at family reunions are now openly and personally available for scrutiny and review any time of the day or night. It is a bit upsetting that my next door neighbor could actually become better acquainted with my cousins in Washington than I am.

And so, I am forced to enter the virtual interaction as well.

I have been impressed by my cousin Allyson's blog site and her amazing ability to capture her family moments and personal musings in writing so compelling that I read every word that she wrote and every comment to every word and wanted to read more. I found myself thinking that it was more like reading the work of a stranger than someone I knew. On her blog they all called her "Ally" a name I have never heard anyone in our family use. She even refers to herself as Ally and her screenname is Ally. Perhaps this is the real her, hidden from my point of view from inside the box of her role in our family.

I have learned about my Judd cousins and Winn cousins on their myspace pages through their self descriptions, choice of music, pics and comments from their "friends". All of a sudden, I feel that I am looking at these people whom I have literally known since birth in a new light. I can see who they are better outside of our weekend family gatherings when their hair is let down and their behavior is more normal. Maybe this interface takes away the awkwardness of not being able to find a place to start with a person you have known forever but never really talked to in a meaningful way.

So if this is this only way I am able to meet my family in a way that lets me really see them and find out what makes them tick, then so be it. Maybe it will make the real interactions a little more meaningful in the end. And, at least when it comes to the family parts of their back stories, I will at least know the players.

I am not a gifted writer, I ramble and like run-on sentences. I am better at talking one on one which is important since I spend most of my day listening (or trying to at least) to people and help them find a way to heal themselves. So, I may not write something as poignant or interesting as you may find on the links I have listed to my cousins and siblings and aunties, but I will try to make a place where those who know me can keep up - check out the other blogs - some are just pics from our family, the baseball trip is by far the most exciting, but again a little lacking in completeness and maybe I will finish it someday.