A touching story from Mashable on the use of social media to touch a family’s soul. SkyBluePink
Right in the feels. I think I have something in my eye.
This caregiving journey has been a long, hard road. But along the way, there have been blessings…and lessons.
1. Put on your own oxygen mask first.
2. Ask for help.
3. Always look on the bright side of life.
4. Do what works for YOU.
5. Be prepared.
6. Grandchildren and grandparents bless one another.
7. Blow off steam.
8. The little things ARE the big things.
I dug this out of my drafts. I’d written it 5 days before Mom died. No wonder it was abandoned. Still, it’s kind of a funny story, and a good illustration (cautionary tale?) of caregiving stress. Enjoy!
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the bus stop the other day.
At least, people TELL me it’s funny. I think they’re only laughing because it didn’t happen to THEM.
Another weekday morning at Casa de Sandwiched: I am sleeping in (again) because I can’t manage to put myself to bed on time, at least partly because I’m so worried about Grandma. Big Sis is stressed about the last day of standardized testing at school. Little Sis is running around, trying to decide who to help first.
After an hour of hurrying and worrying, we finally barrel down the basement stairs and fling open the door to the garage to find a torrential, monsoon-like downpour. And the 9-year-old can’t find her jacket.
Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon documented his mother’s final days to his more than 1.2 million Twitter followers.
There’s a great piece here on the way Scott Simon tweeted the loss of his mother.
They’re the same reasons I decided to blog life with my mom: to get support, and to share the lessons I learned along the way.
Photo credit: Stephen Voss/NPR
Photo credit: DesireeFawn on flickr
I attended BlogHer ’13 in Chicago last week. It was a great experience, for many reasons, which I hope to get into in a recap post.
It was a different experience than I’d had at BlogHer ’09. Back then, my world was different. I was blogging for myself. I had bloggy friends. We tweeted bloggy things at one another.
Not this time.
I’d abandoned my “mommyblog-with-a-twist.”
Now I’m blogging professionally. I told myself I was going to the conference to try to make professional connections. Like a professional grown-up.
When I got there, the conference felt familiar, and friendly.
Except I felt like I’d isolated myself from that community, and it was 100% my own doing. I didn’t belong anymore, and it was my own fault.
“Life is like a sandwich!
Birth as one slice,
and death as the other.
What you put in-between
the slices is up to you.
Is your sandwich tasty or sour?”
― Allan Rufus
This post was inspired by Michelle Rafter and posted over at BlogHer.
I started blogging in 2008, mostly to save my sanity. I had just become an unwilling member of the sandwich generation, and it pushed me into a deep depression. I was a stay-at-home mom with 2 young kids and a chronically ill elderly mother, and blogging helped me remember that there was more to life than caregiving.
I jumped into social media to promote my blog posts, and stayed because it was fun. Today I’m more active in social media than on my blog, but I do still post from time to time.
My mom died in April 2011, and with my kids in school all day, I had some room to breathe. I volunteered to help a local charity set up their blog & social media. I put together an About.me page. Within a few months, I was hired by a former employer as a social media consultant in the nonprofit arts education sector.
Proof that luck is where preparation meets opportunity!
The job is perfect for me at the moment. It’s part time, and I can do it from home with a very flexible schedule. I have a passion for arts education. I’m on social media every chance I get anyway; it’s about time I got paid for it! It was a revelation to me that not everyone knew the ins, outs and best practices of social media, and that not everyone could string together sentences the way I can. It’s definitely a marketable skill at the moment.
For me, it was 320 blog posts that changed my career. And I’m grateful.
Stop SOPA!
I pirated this from my friend at The Oatmeal. SOPA is bad. Go tell your senators. NOW.
If you were following me on Twitter this past Saturday night, you may have noticed that I was tweeting about #grandnationals. Nonstop.
Yeah. Sorry about that.
If you’re not familiar with the event, the Bands of America Grand National Championships is an event which brings together high school marching bands from all over the country to perform for one another and before a huge audience of their peers and the general public.
Fair disclosure: I used to work for Bands of America. It was tough, but I loved it. I loved band. Last week, our hometown band packed up and left for Indianapolis, and I packed up my family and followed. Big Sis is a 5th grade beginning band student who plays the saxophone. I thought showing her how the big kids do it would be a great incentive to stay in band for another (gulp!) eight years.
We went and were floored by the quality of the performances. The folks at the National Association of Music Parents learned that I was the parent of a beginning band student, and wanted to hear what I thought of the event. It’s my first blog post for them, so I’d be much obliged if you’d leave a comment there for me, or even share it on Twitter or Facebook.
This band was a lot of fun to watch. They used fully functional QR codes as giant prop banners on the field. They tweet, too! I think they might just win for best use of social media.
DJ Corchin did a great recap at Marching.com. He’s super funny, and he plays trombone, which makes him a-ok in my book. Check it out!
In the meantime, here are a few photos from the event. Enjoy!
Sandwiched 