Missing Home

With college students across the country settling into their homes away from home, many are left missing family and friends. My guest blogger this week, Emily Boyer (a college freshman), offers a few tips on staying connected to loved ones.

Emily writes: I thought I’d always have my parents close to me. Now that I am in college—reality check! Plus, now I have to do things for myself that my parents used to do. But if I ever need my mom or my dad, they are only a phone call away. I now cherish every moment I get with my parents because I know they won’t be around forever.

Here are a few ways to stay connected to family:

• If you can’t make it home, make a phone call! Sometimes you just want to talk with your parents about your day. Maybe you need advice about something going on in school or your life in general. Conversation with your parents is not only a good bonding moment, but it’s also a good way to stay connected.
• Send a card in the mail—one that says “thinking of you” or “miss you.”
• Arrange family activities. When you do get a chance to go home, plan a game night, go to the movies, or make dinner together. Take simple activities as an opportunity for quality time. And involve the whole family!
• Then, take pictures of those family moments and email them to your parents when they least expect it.
• Create your own “memory board” of family and friend pictures. Nothing is better than a seeing a smiling face on a tough day.

Use your time with your parents wisely. I miss my family a lot these days and look for every opportunity to stay connected.

Manners, Huh?

My guest blogger, Cheyenne Beeman, is writing about manners and wondering “where have they gone?” It’s a part of my new series, which asks young adults to weigh in on today’s issues. Cheyenne writes:

Last week, as I walked into a restaurant, I held the door open for someone. To my astonishment, she just walked by. She didn’t even say thank you!  I could not fathom doing that. That incident really got me thinking about how manners have changed over the years. Have we gotten too busy to mind our manners?

I come from a family where manners are taught at a very young age. If I didn’t say please or thank you, I was being disrespectful. I feel like in this day and age, we are taught to do whatever we want because in the end everyone is a winner anyways. I think a problem with today’s society is that we just do not care anymore. If we stop caring about the little things, like opening a door for someone or being respectful enough to chew with our mouths closed, how can we be expected to care about the big things?

I finish in saying this: Manners really have not changed much over the decades. All that has changed is our willingness to use manners and live by them. Can you imagine how different society and the world we live in would be if we just changed the way we looked at manners and embraced them?   Can you imagine how positively our outlooks on life and interactions throughout the day would change?

 

New Blog Series

Thanks for stopping by my blog. I’m starting something new this week. I’ll be hosting a “hot topics” blog, and you’ll get to read what young adults are saying about new TV shows, bad manners or habits, social media etiquette, and more. This week, guest blogger Landon Walker is talking about being a college athlete. He writes:

As a college baseball player, I hope to one day do what many athletes have done and do what some have not done. But I will never be able to accomplish those goals  if I don’t work to reach them. Some of today’s top professional athletes get paid the “big bucks” and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. But do these athletes really deserve these salaries?

Athletes like Mike Trout have to eat right, practice/train, and travel all the time. They have to be dedicated and make sacrifices for their team or they will not get paid. They compete at very high levels against other talented individuals. They don’t just go out and do what they do either. They have to work hard to enhance their talent on the playing field. They put in the work to keep getting better.

It is not all fun and games, and they have to work hard to live the dream.