Valerie Rochon is eager to read her email every Monday morning, even when it makes her cry. In addition to the endless Zoom meeting invitations, each week brings a new poem tucked into otherwise matter-of-fact messages about the coronavirus pandemic from the Portsmouth city manager. Tammi Truax, the city’s poet laureate, has been contributing to the newsletters since early April, elevating the collection of public health updates and community resources with a layer of emotion and introspection.
Recognizing that many will continue to home school in the Fall, school psychologist Roseann Capanna-Hodge offers a variety of means by which parents and children can promote good learning and wellness. These include creating a designated space for learning, overall having a routine and structure to lower cognitive demand, minimizing stimuli that cause agitation, fatigue, or any reaction such as noise, lighting, smells, and tactile needs, and assessing your child’s preferred methods for learning (visual, auditory, etc.). Read the full articles and complete, specific recommendations at Forbes.com.
Every Monday, the Daily Dose is dedicated to starting your week right with a brief guided mindfulness exercise. As we continue to adjust to life with COVID-19, many of us continue to straddle between the safety precautions that have been in place since March and returns to normalcy which, itself, creates more of a feeling of unsettledness and harriedness. As such, today we offer a very brief and very effective exercise. The goal of this activity is to notice when the hectic nature of the day is seeping in and to hit reset – spending just 3 minutes focused on your breathing. This exercise comes courtesy of the MyLife app.
When the coronavirus pandemic forced the University of Vermont to close and send its students home, the alarm spread: What would happen to the cows? The university’s beloved herd of about 100 dairy cows is normally tended by students taking part in the Cooperative for Real Education in Agricultural Management program, or CREAM, and without those students, the fate of the cows seemed to be in jeopardy.
Find out how alumni and students came together to solve this problem at https://apnews.com/01757ed26d4f6a2af57af3b0fa61a6b7.
Children are naturally curious, so it’s especially important to be careful with children around any body of water. According to the Centers for Disease Control, drowning is one of the top 10 causes of death for children in every region of the world. Most drownings in children under the age of 4 years happen in home swimming pools, whether at their own home or that of a friend, relative or neighbor. These guidelines can help protect children at the pool or near a lake or at the beach.
Pediatrician Amanda Kay, M.D., MPH discusses strategies including keeping kids at arm’s length, having designated water-watchers, learning CPR, and how to be COVID-wise this summer while having fun! Read more at https://news.christianacare.org/2020/07/whos-watching-those-tots/
Every Monday, the Daily Dose is dedicated to starting your week right with a brief guided mindfulness exercise. One emotion many of us are hesitant to acknowledge, especially in the moment, is anger. Like any emotion, in small doses and the right situations, anger has a job to do and can be beneficial. It is meant to motivate you and others to find solutions to problems. Tara Brach teachers us that, when anger is held in mindfulness, it can energize us to respond wisely to challenging situations. This meditation guides us in meeting personal or societal anger with RAIN – recognize, allow, investigate and nurture.
Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Kiana Muschett-Owes treasured one spot above all: the family’s round dining table. There, family members would gather to recount their days, debate issues, celebrate any occasion they could think of — and of course, to eat. Along with basic nourishment, the table provided sustenance for the soul, says Muschett-Owes. She’s tried to replicate that feeling at her own restaurant, Katie O’s, which she launched six years ago in nearby Prospect Lefferts Gardens, specializing in soul food. And now, she’s trying to give a little of both — soul food, and food for the soul — back to her community, amidst a pandemic that has exposed just how easy it is to go hungry in New York by distributing between 1,000 and 1,500 meals to Brooklyn’s needy, accompanied by uplifting notes tucked into the boxes, with prayers or thoughts like “We’ll get through this” or “What doesn’t kill you will build you.” She also asks questions: how are people doing, whether they’ve lost their jobs. “This isn’t just, ‘grab your food and go,’” she says.
Read more about Kiana’s story in her AP News feature.
While many of us have been well-intentioned before and during COVID in terms of resolving to make sweeping lifestyle changes, it is common to become complacent. Many have continued to aim to quit smoking, lose 20 pounds, AND start exercising daily. While it is good to have goals, the beginning of better health doesn’t always have to mean making huge leaps and, in fact, should not! In today’s Daily Dose emphasizes that great change comes from taking one small step and mastering that, before moving on to the greater goal. The below article describes 10 potential ways to improve your health. Pick one (or choose your own) and see if you can slowly master it over the next two weeks. If so, great, move forward! If it is a challenge, taking a step back and consider a smaller, simpler goal to gain a sense of mastery before retrying the more advanced health behavior change.
https://www.rush.edu/health-wellness/discover-health/10-simple-ways-improve-your-health
Self-soothing is something many of us learned to varying degrees from the time we were infants, through childhood, and something we refine throughout the rest of our lives. The core question when self-soothing is what simple thing can we do to make us feel better? These are usually based in the physical world, appearing to our five senses. The goal is to use them both proactively as well as when we are feeling distressed, when you feel that you cannot tolerate a situation anymore and cannot leave it. Today’s mindfulness exercise is brought to us by Tamara Levitt at Calm.com, who guides us through a 10-minute mindfulness meditation that can serve as an introduction to incorporating self-soothing into your day.
On an idyllic summer evening not far from the shore of Lake Champlain, the immortal words of William Shakespeare float from a lush backyard, professionally performed — for an audience of six. Jena Necrason of the Vermont Shakespeare Festival throws herself into the role of Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” lamenting the vagaries of the heart. Her husband John Nagle follows, performing Jaques’ famous soliloquy from “As You Like It”: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.”
Learn more about this adventure and the program that was established after COVID-19 forced the festival to cancel its summer season at https://apnews.com/12fa100833bb455df9c53b74f9e75ddc
