Special Smiles

Another great weekend is drawing to a close and I feel relaxed and well-rested. That might be because I didn't do a lick of homework this weekend but I did promote dental health awareness which counts as productivity in my book. Yesterday a few of my classmates and I spent the day at the Special Olympics Summer Games in Mt. Pleasant, MI helping screen athletes for oral disease and giving them oral hygiene instructions and encouragement. With the help of a few cuddly stuffed animals (with full mouths of plastic teeth) and jumbo toothbrushes, we demonstrated and discussed proper brushing and flossing technique with the athletes and tried to get them excited about good oral health. Unfortunately, people with special needs are one of the most medicinally underserved populations due to the special resources or accomodations providers must make for them. It certainly is a challenge to resonate with, say, an 8 year-old with Down Syndrome enough to encourage him or her to maintain good oral health but it's a challenge I willingly accept as a member of the healthcare community. Although teaching good brushing technique alone won't eradicate this disparity, I'm doing what I can at this point and look forward to doing more in the future. I've posted a couple of pictures below of us in action :)

In other news, my recent obsession as of late has become spelling. You read that right. Spelling. Amidst all the hullabaloo of the Scripps National Spelling Bee last week and my unabashed claim to be the best speller in our class, my friends have been tossing spelling challenges my way left and right lately. Goad? No problem. Vacuum? Of course there's only one "c"! Ennui? No, I don't know French but I can spell it! Liaison? Bet you'd have missed that second "i"! Ha! I'm practically unbeatable! Of course I flub up sometimes and I don't doubt for one second that those rugrats from Scripps would probably make me cry in 4 minutes flat but I'm a pretty darn good lay-speller if I do say so myself. My buddy Pat has challenged me to a spelling bee-r, a modified spelling bee in which an alcoholic beverage serves as the ultimate equalizer. We're such nerds. Maybe I'll give him a handicap and I'll have a glass of wine with dinner that night.

Or maybe I won't. How do you spell champion again? Oh yeah: S-O-N-Y-A ;)

xoxox

p.s. ~ the winning word from Scripps this year was ursprache, a noun meaning a language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages. Whaaaaa?