This year I'll be doing something a bit different: I'll be donating to my grandson's school's Arts&Letters Sale. I fiddle with beads and found objects, making small three-dimensional wall sculptures out of branches and twigs, feathers and ribbon, beads, washers, wire, and old jewelry. I enjoy it- giving a new life to something discarded- and I like keeping my hands busy, my mind busy. I'm planning to create an ArtCard piece like the ones I've been making while I'm studying ABM: beautiful wood, found; beads from my stash, some over a hundred years old. Ribbon, chain, feathers, turned into landscapes and waterfalls, small, complete, infinite. Won't that be fun? I've sent for my ArtCard- can't wait for it to come in the mail!

Signal boost for another IndieGoGo project: This is four enterprising young men with adventurous and open spirits who just need that little boost more to get there. Less than $600 to go. Can you help? You canhelp!

Day 24, segment 3, Anat Baniel Method Training

I'm just going to use this post as a place to showcase the wonderful people I'm in training with, or, rather, their websites/blogs.

Of course, Anat: This is Anat@ TEDxBerkeley


Try the short exercise in the video, then check back from time to time and see what's new.

Chelsea: Parent of a child with CP: Cerebral Palsy Mentor
Dan Oullette, Certified Massage Therapist, Saskatoon, Alberta, Canada & parent of a child with CP

I'll be adding as I get permission from people to link them here.

If you're in the SF Bay Area tomorrow and looking for an evening thing to do, there's a Free Experiential Presentation particularly directed at people with neck and back problems, including headaches and trouble walking, at 6pm at the ABM Center 4330 Redwood Drive, San Rafael, CA. This Saturday, Sept 18, 2011

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Why I love the internet

I do. I love the internet.

I was the girl who lived in the library. I loved the way the dictionaries and encyclopediae and atlases and biographies and fiction wove around and through each other. I loved traveling through time and space, and I loved the idea that someone, somewhere, somewhen, thought whatever I was reading had been important enough to write it down and leave it where I might find it, like a love letter, or secret treasure.

The interconnectedness the internet gives: a real-time, extended-space ability to explore, to learn, to reach and be reached- what a wonder it is.

Sites like IndieGoGo and favo.rs, LinkedIn make me happy. Mommy Blogs and Nursing Blogs and Science Blogs and Quaker Blogs and Money Blogs make me happy. And the endless creativity of people makes me very, very happy.

To that end, here, from Favo.rs.com, The Periodic Table of The Social Web. Fun, isn't it? [Click through to see the whole thing, if, as on my laptop, this layout cuts it off. Clearly, my layout needs some help from someone on the Periodic Table!]

Created By Favo.rs

And to top it off, Andrea at SoOverDebt is inspiring me to post more often with her 100th post Celebration contest. Thanks, Andrea!

IndieGoGo

A couple years ago, I donated money to a small film project. The project was The Bully Project, and the donation site was IndieGoGo. Since then I've watched both grow. Today The Bully Project is a film, and IndieGoGo is thriving.

I'm now working on my own pitch. I'm going to need sponsors to pull off this new education in Anat Baniel Method. I'm already a member of a number of survey panels, including VocalPoint; I use coupons; I recycle cans and bottles, wear my clothes forever, cook from scratch. But this is the 4th year in a row with no raise in wages, but with a raise in healthcare premiums [I pay $133 a week now, just for myself], car insurance, gas and food, I'm going to have to get more creative and be more vulnerable than ever.

So. The next few posts will be working out exactly how I practice Nursing (my brand, if you will); why I feel, think, know ABM is a good fit with Nursing; and what I will do with ABM (besides open my own practice- I look forward to having clients of my own).

I hope some of you will follow me on my journey. It's a fun one.

Parent Activism, or Why I'm Glad I Met Getty Today

I didn't actually meet Getty today. I was going through some BlogHer posts, and on the very last one at The 818 saw an ad for a CD of lullabies, "Sweet Water Child: Lullabies for Getty ~All proceeds go to fight SMA1". Well. I always want to hear new original lullabies. And SMA1 is something I know a tiny bit about from working in Pediatric ICU, and with medically fragile children.

So, I went to listen. It's just lovely. My favorite song is "Sleeptight Dreamkeep", but they're all good. It's available on iTunes for $9.99 or each song for $.99.

Babies are born competent.

That's my single favorite sentence in any nursing textbook I've ever read, bar none.

April 1980, and I'm starting to panic a bit about State Boards. Back in the day there was no NCLEX-RN Exam. Each state gave their own exam, and California's was due soon after graduation in May. Three days in Sacramento, staying over every night, at the long tables in the Sacramento Convention Center during the day with Scantrons and #2 pencils. I've not ever had much trouble with multiple choice tests, but this one wouldn't be offered again until December, and I couldn't afford to fail.

So I'm down in San Francisco with my friend [who's also an RN] at Stacey's Bookstore on Market Street, down in the basement, looking at nursing books, and I find an Outline of Pediatric Nursing. That seems promising, as I don't feel as though I'll have the brain to read a lot of content, but I might be able to use an outline to jog my memory.

Open it to the first page of the actual outline, and there it is. Babies are born competent.

How I love that sentence. My older son was born in 1971, my younger in 1973. T. Berry Brazelton's Neonatal Behavorial Assessment Scale (NBAS) hadn't been published at that point, but I was fortunate to have been guided by a friend to an excellent pediatrician who understood that we are not born useless and helpless but ready to engage anyone willing to listen. Equally fortunate for me was being able to work with a number of different infants in baby daycare [very unusual at that time] which gave me numerous opportunities to notice how each baby tried to get (and succeeded at getting) my attention. I remember every one of them with great fondness and respect, including [but not limited to] my own sons. I learned so much.

I'm not saying I became suddenly enlightened- far from it- but I had had, by the time I found the Outline of Pediatrics, many, many chances to stop being such a *grown-up* and start being a human being. In other words, I didn't have to know everything, to be right, to study for, and pass, State Boards. I just needed to be competent. To remember that people are working on this stuff all the time- nursing, medicine, parenting, education- and none of it's a finished product. It's all work in becoming, and I'm part of that- both the work, and the becoming.

Babies are born competent.

That's each of us. Whether premature, whether injured at birth, whether our DNA incorporates some unfortunate combination of genes that will bring sorrow later- Each of us is born competent, in no hurry to do anything but engage the attention of those more skilled in handling the needs of life than we are.

These are some of my favorite books for becoming a more skilled adult- skilled at listening to, skilled at connecting with, infants and young children. Three are out of print, but it's worth putting the effort in to finding them.

Born Dancing: How Intuitive Parents Understand Their Baby's Unspoken Language and Natural Rhythms

The First Six Months

The Laughing Baby : Songs & Rhymes from Around the World