Tuesday, October 30th, 2012
The seniors on an undefeated Arizona high school football team are working as a team in a unique way–they’re lending advice and support to a special-needs girl who has been the target of bullies because of her health issues. The New York Daily News has more:
A group of kindhearted seniors on Arizona’s Queen Creek High School football team have lent Chy Johnson some tactical defense, helping a girl whose brain disorder once made her an easy target for bullies.
The new friendship started when Elizabeth Johnson, whose daughter said girls threw trash on her at school, contacted starting quarterback Carson Jones.
“I emailed Carson, told him that Chy was having some issues, was just wanting some names,” she told a local television station.
“He took it a step further and went and gathered Chy up at lunch and she’s been eating lunch with them ever since,” Johnson said.
Jones, fellow teammate Tucker Workman and many other Queen Creek Bulldogs have also started looking after Chy throughout the day, a move that has stopped people from bothering her.
“I guess they’ve seen her with us or something,” Jones said.
Monday, October 29th, 2012
The Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee was the site of a fun surprise for patients recently–not something that often happens in the scary environment of a hospital. A group of window washers amazed kids by dressing in superhero costumes which they donned while they clambered up the windows on the outside of the building. ABC News has more:
“The kids always come up to the window and ask us, ‘Are you Spiderman?’” Steve Oszaniec, a 23-year employee of the Chicago-based American National Skyline window cleaning company, told ABCNews.com today. “So I came up with the idea of, ‘Why don’t we just show up as Spiderman?’”
With the plan hatched, Oszaniec, son Danny Oszaniec and their colleague, Jordan Emerson, pitched the idea to their boss, Sean Conley, in the company’s Memphis office and to hospital administrators, who all quickly said yes.
The trio then purchased their costumes – two Spiderman suits and one Captain America – and Oct. 17 turned the hospital into a scene straight out of a comic book.
“We just went there, put them on and went up,” Oszaniec said. “They [hospital staff] brought a lot of the kids to the little family room there so they could see us. It was unbelievable. They just totally forgot they were sick for a minute. They were just ecstatic about it.”
Oszaniec, who describes himself in real-life as “more Captain Old Country than Captain America,” says the dressed-up superheroes also shot silly string as they repelled up and down the 12-story hospital building for four hours to make their Spiderman takeover even more life-like.
Hospital administrators say what Oszaniec and his colleagues did was, all jokes aside, truly heroic.
“It’s a real thing,” hospital spokeswoman Sara Burnett said of the use of out-of-the-box therapies like this one to help kids heal. “When a child’s mind gets off their pain and their sickness, it makes them heal, it makes them relax and it helps them recover and get better quicker.”
Image: Window washer, via Shutterstock
Monday, June 11th, 2012
An inspiring story from two Boston mothers who found themselves in a situation that would make many a child’s blood run cold–a little girl’s favorite stuffed bunny, Nummy, fell out of the girl’s stroller and onto train tracks in Boston. From the mothers’ blog, Life with Roozle:
By the time I got to the bottom of the stairs, the next train had come, but was stopped halfway through the station. The doors remained closed. And there I saw her, Nummy. She was sitting on the platform, just right. The conductor of the next train, in the middle of rush hour, had stopped the train, picked Nummy up and put her back on the platform for us. I thanked the worked profusely and ran back to Michelle and Roozle who had now started coming down the elevator to find out where I had gone. I waited for them at the top of the elevator, Nummy in hand to be reunited with her Roozle. Michelle strolled Roozle and Nummy over to the worker’s station where Roozle shouted a big thank you to her for saving her friend.
Image: Nummy, via Life with Roozle.
