Monday, August 17, 2009

Well, it’s hard to believe that summer is almost over and it’s time for most kids to head back to school!  I still remember that jittery feeling I always had the first day or two in class.  I would always gravitate toward a few friends that I had known before, but, inevitably, there was always a sense of “newness” and the “unknown about starting back.  I bet kids today get that same feeling and may not know quite how to adapt to newcomers in their class or other kids they don’t know that well.  (Especially if they come with behavior issues!)
Karen Schatz, who writes a blog for the Baltimore Sun called “Charm City Moms” interviewed an elementary school teacher and came up with some good advice for kids starting back to school:

1. Start the year with an open mind.  Kids should not be too quick to prejudge newcomers or how their behavior might affect them.  Give them the benefit of the doubt, at least initially.

2. Empower your child to ignore annoying behavior.  Not all bad behavior is harmful, and just not responding to annoying behavior may be enough to suppress it.  There’s no reason to continue if it doesn’t get any attention.

3. If a child’s safety is threatened, involve an adult.  This is true if it’s your child or someone else. Behavior that is truly harmful cannot be tolerated and adult intervention is needed to correct this. Most teachers will have rules in place to allow this.

4. If you must get involved, try to do so without your child present.  If your child thinks you are worried about the situation, that will only reinforce their own fears.  It’s best if they don’t even know about a meeting.

Hopefully these ideas will be helpful for your children as they adapt to the new school year, peers, and classroom.  And let them know that Doodlestix will be writing them real soon!

Posted by Richard on 08/17 at 09:37 AM
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Friday, August 14, 2009

In addition to running Doodlestix, Richard and I are both pharmacists. I still work within the industry as a Director of Medical Information and Richard is the Chair of the Department of Pharmacy Practice at Lipscomb University.  We thought with many parents preparing their children for the return to school this Fall and the rapidly approaching flu season, we’d put on our pharmacist hats and share some information we hope will be useful and keep your families healthy this Fall!

You’ve already heard a lot about Swine Flu, also known as H1N1 influenza.  Schools and daycare are normally where the flu can really take off like a wild fire.  What’s worrisome about the H1N1 virus is that hardly anyone has any immunity to it so if you’re exposed, you’re likely to get sick.  We’ve seen more cases this summer than usual and that’s concerning because summer time is usually a quiet time for the flu.  The good news is that this flu doesn’t seem as bad as some strains, though it still can be very dangerous.

What can you do to protect your child?  At the moment, the H1N1 vaccine is not yet ready, but you can do these things:

• Clean your hands often and cover your coughs and sneezes


• Tell your child to:


1. Stay away from people who are sick


2. Clean hands often


3. Keep hands away from face


4. Cover coughs and sneezes to protect others (it’s best to use a tissue and throw it away).


• Call or take your child to a doctor right away if your child:


• has a high fever or fever that lasts a long time


• has trouble breathing or breathes fast


• has skin that looks blue


• is not drinking enough


• seems confused, will not wake up, does not want to be held, or has seizures (uncontrolled shaking)


• gets better but then worse again


• has other conditions (like heart or lung disease, diabetes) that get worse


• If your child is sick with a bad cold or the flu, your child should stay home to rest and to avoid giving the flu to other children.


• Your child can go back to school after his or her temperature has been normal for 24 hours.


• Your child may be prescribed Tamiflu or Relenza to shorten the course of the flu by a day or so.  If your child has asthma, Relenza should not be used.

We recommend you head over to the Centers for Disease Control’s website where they have a page with Advice for Parents on Talking to Children About Novel H1N1 Flu (Formerly Swine Flu) Concerns.  Be sure to check the CDC’s website throughout the Fall as they’ll probably be the best source of information to keep you up-to-date on flu information.

All of the staff at Doodlestix wishes all of the kids returning to school in the coming days and weeks a happy (and healthy) Fall!

Until next time,
Bob

Posted by Bob on 08/14 at 10:35 AM
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Thursday, April 23, 2009

Have you ever seen a brother and sister so different you’ve wondered aloud, “Did they come out of the same mother?”!!  Our two kids are like that.  Our firstborn, a boy, was a floppy baby, even as he was being delivered.  He was perfectly healthy, though he surprised us by coming 4 weeks early, but you could tell this was a pretty passive baby.  As he grew over the next few months, he smiled at everybody, and his eyes just watched everything.  You could tell he was laid back, taking it all in.  His laid back ways played out throughout his childhood and teen years.  Our second child, a girl, came out of the womb like a ball of fire.  And then she screamed for the next 10 months or so.  What a tightly wound, outgoing, ball of fire!  And to this day, she’s basically the same way.

Kids come pre-wired right out of the womb. It may seem obvious, but each child is preciously different from the next.  What that means is that our approach to parenting can be very different from child to child.  How we approach one child may have little or no effect on the next. This plays out in an infinite number of ways: with some kids, you can ask them to do something, some you just have to tell.  Others resent being told or asked anything.  My point is, take a look at how you’re teaching your child, how you’re interacting with your child.  What does he or she respond to? Are you aware of the adjustments you need to be making from one child to the next?  Is what you’re doing working?

Happy parenting!

Bob

Posted by Matt on 04/23 at 10:41 AM
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Thursday, January 08, 2009

A lot of people ask me where the idea for Doodlestix came from.  Sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it?—a fictitious pen-pal who writes letters to children to encourage them to do what’s right.  It’s actually a bit challenging for us to try to describe what Doodlestix is in a brief sound bite that can be used for advertising and such.

The idea for Doodlestix is actually a convergence of several things in my life that just happened to coincide with this idea.  I have always loved writing.  In high school I was the editor of the school newspaper and I even won an award as a reporter for the newspaper in a nearby city.  Then when I went to college, my English teacher tried to talk me into changing my major from pre-pharmacy to English!  She said I could make a living writing just as well.

But writing seemed too easy for me.  It just kind of came naturally and it didn’t feel like I was actually working when I was writing.  So I stuck with pharmacy, which has been a great career for me.  I’ve worked in community pharmacies, hospital pharmacies, manufacturing laboratories, nursing homes, pharmacy school, medical school, and even in the pharmaceutical industry.  And, yes, while I was in graduate school, I took a part-time job writing medical abstracts for a pharmacy journal!

Fast forward about five years.  In 1983, my wife, Lauren, and I had the first of our three children, a son.  Two daughters followed in the next three years.  During that time, I happened to see an ad in a newspaper magazine for the Institute of Children’s Literature in Connecticut.  They were offering a free writing aptitude test and since I had three kids, I thought it might be kind of fun to write some stories for them and try to get them published.  Long story short, I was accepted into the Institute and began my writing coursework.  It was really cool to be able to write stories and send them in and have them critiqued by some of the best children’s writers in the country!

Well, like a lot of things with me, I got about halfway through this course and got bogged down.  I had changed jobs and had a lot of new responsibilities.  I was also commuting to a medical school about an hour away from where I lived.  So the writing kind of fell by the wayside – for about 10 years!  But it always nagged me that I hadn’t completed the coursework, because I really did enjoy it, so about ten years later, when life was a lot less hectic, I re-enrolled in the Institute and completed the course and received my diploma.

By this time I was working for a large pharmaceutical company and began to get interested in business.  In fact, I got so interested in business, that I enrolled in a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) degree program with the University of Maryland University College, U of M’s distance education program.  I especially liked the part of the program about entrepreneurship, starting up new businesses from scratch.  I thought about trying to start a business in pharmaceuticals, but that takes a lot of investment financing and has a ton of regulatory issues to deal with, so I didn’t want all those headaches.

Then we had a course in the MBA program on business ethics.  This was right after the Enron and Worldcom meltdowns and was a very hot topic at the time.  It occurred to me then that it was kind of sad that we had to have an entire course in business school to teach adults the basics of right and wrong!  But as I reflected on how our culture as a country had changed over the last several years, with less emphasis in schools on good behavior and fewer people attending religious services, it kind of made sense that business ethics was a much needed course in MBA programs.  Also, I observed that a number of people I knew who had small children, realized this was important, but just didn’t know how to go about teaching their children the basics of right and wrong.

Then it all clicked!  Here was a need that a lot of people have.  What if their children could get a letter regularly from another child who would help them understand why it’s important to do what’s right?  The perspective of another child would not appear as an authority figure telling them what to do.  And with the availability of databases and the internet, the letters could be customized to reflect the unique situations of each child and delivered either electronically (to keep costs down) or in the mail if preferred. 

Where did the name, Doodlestix, come from?  Believe it, or not, thin air!  My wife and I were driving around one afternoon and I was describing the concept of the business to her.  But I told her that we would have to come up with a really catchy name that kids would like and parents would remember.  Something like, like, like, Doodlestix!  Honest to gosh, that just came out of thin air.  But it stuck, and Doodlestix is alive and well today!

I quickly realized that I was in way over my head for what I envisioned this becoming.  I have a bit of a creative streak and love to write, but I knew I was never going to be able to pull off the technical aspects of this, because I am not that technically savvy.  But I remembered an old friend that I had worked with in the past who was really, really good with databases and operations stuff, so I approached him about my idea.  He quickly brought in his son and a friend of his son who both had previous experience in starting online businesses.  They are responsible for the user friendly website, the customization capability, and the great images and Doodlestix logos you see on our website!  It also just happens that I have a sister who has taught second grade for over 40 years and has developed an entire character education curriculum for her elementary school, so I roped her into being an advisor for us to review the content of our letters and to lead advisory panels with customers about our product and our business.

We are really happy to be able to provide this service for you.  Our primary goal is to help kids learn to do what’s right and stay out of trouble and to provide an easy way for parents to get some help to teach their kids.  If we make some money off of this along the way, we won’t complain, but we have really tried to make it as affordable as possible so that any child could receive these letters without it being a financial burden on the parents.  We welcome ideas, suggestions, comments, and even complaints or criticisms if you have them.  We’ll do our best to respond quickly and use your insight and wisdom to try to improve our product and service.

Richard Thompson, PharmD, MBA
Founder and CEO
Doodlestix, Inc.

Posted by Richard on 01/08 at 04:27 PM
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Friday, October 10, 2008

We’re rapidly closing in on our first mailing date, Wednesday, October 15th.  Wow.  I think I can speak for the whole team when I say that all of our fingers are crossed that the final updates to our back-end customer management software will be finished by then.  We’ve been steadily working towards launch for the better part of a year and a half now and it’s thrilling to be so close. 

Our beta test sign up period begins today, sort of as a “soft launch” before we ramp up our marketing initiatives.  If you’re interested in getting in on the beta phase with a free subscription, shoot me an email at with “SOFT LAUNCH” in the subject line.  As a member of the beta launch group you’ll receive:

• a sneak peek at the Doodlestix service
• a free lifetime subscription (limited to one child per subscription) to Doodlestix
• the option to become a charter member of the Parent Advisory Panel
• an opportunity to provide feedback on Doodlestix - from the content of the letters to the actual paper they’re printed on and everything in between

We’re going to limit the beta test group to 50 subscriptions, so if you’re interested, be sure to email me ASAP!  This limited time offer is going to expire at midnight Sunday, October 12 or when 50 codes have been redeemed - whichever comes first - so be sure to email me to get your code now.

Just a reminder, we ship our Once-a-Month Letter Subscriptions on the 1st of each month and our Twice-a-Month Letter Subscriptions on the 1st and 15th of each month.

Once again, send me an email () with “SOFT LAUNCH” in the subject line for the special code.

Posted by Matt on 10/10 at 08:42 AM
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Tuesday, September 02, 2008

If you’re anything like 98% of the population, you probably asked yourself “Doodle-what?!?” when you heard about Doodlestix or found our site online.  We have to admit, it’s a question each of us has asked too.  At least Bob, Sam, and I (Matt) have...it was Richard’s crazy idea to get this whole thing started!  So today, I’m going to sit down and provide a little bit of background on who and what Doodlestix is and the folks behind it. 

It’s probably a good idea to start with the person that came up with the idea.  That’d be Richard.  In his non-Doodlestix life in an alternate universe, he’s a department chair at Lipscomb University’s new College of Pharmacy.  Throughout the years he’s had varying roles in helping kids learn about character education and finally decided to combine his passion for teaching kids valuable life lessons with his passion for writing.  As a freshly minted graduate of the Institute of Children’s Literature he began brainstorming ways to positively impact children’s lives and came up with the idea for a character that writes letters to children from a peer’s perspective to teach them about character traits and other life lessons.  It was about this time that he ran into Bob in an airport while both were dropping their daughters off for a senior trip.

Bob has known Richard for over 22 years, when both were fresh out of pharmacy school and starting out at Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, NC.  There they started a newsletter about drug information for nurse educators; little did they know they’d start another mailing in the future.  Like Richard, Bob’s non-Doodlestix job is in the pharmaceutical industry, working with companies to help improve drug safety and get effective treatments to the patients that need them.  When he bumped into Richard at the airport, he had no idea that two years later he’d be working alongside him in a startup for children’s character education.  Richard told him about his idea for a character, tentatively named “Doodlestix”, and Bob thought he was crazy!  But the idea stuck and grew on him and the two began meeting regularly to discuss and plan a potential company built around this “Doodlestix” character.

Since both were busy working during the day and had other commitments at night, most of the meetings happened during lunch.  And since college students have an innate ability to sense a free meal, I (Matt) soon started showing up at these lunches about Doodlestix.  Richard and Bob had come up with a solid foundation for Doodlestix, but were missing that one key ingredient - how it would work with the internet.  I had previous experience with starting an online store and online marketing so I started helping Doodlestix get its arms around the internet.  It’d be nice to say I was able to answer all their questions and come up with a solution but that’s not the case...shoot, we’re just now ready to launch (two years later)!  As my dad (Bob) says, “two years, that’s kinda embarrassing....but it sure turned out to be a lot more complicated than we thought.”

Which is where Sam enters the picture.  Sam is the one who sits down with the huge whiteboard and figures out how he’s going to subdue technology to do our bidding for our Doodlestix subscribers.  In other words, he’s our programming and IT maniac.  Maniac really is the best word to describe it - he’s incredibly focused on making sure everything works...perfectly.  A little exasperating at times, but his dedication shines through in the end product and this website is a testament to that.  Anyhow, Sam and I had known each other for several years and worked on and off designing websites for other people in the area so it was natural to give him a call and see if he was interested in adding some extracurricular work to his college load.  Countless long nights and having to deal with the “Can we do XYZ cool thing with the website?” and then “Actually, that doesn’t really fit with the concept, can you change it back?” moments, Sam is still here making sure everything is running smoothly. 

During the process of creating Doodlestix, we looked around and realized we were missing something.  That something was the wise and insightful input of someone who is around elementary school aged children 24/7 and has two X chromosomes.  We had to be honest, our surveys had shown primarily moms were interested in the Doodlestix concept.  A second glance around the group and it was apparent the four of us guys might have some trouble connecting with and developing a useful product for moms on our own.  To make the Doodlestix letters effective and have moms actually love to use them would take the perspective of an educator and mother. 

So we recruited Nina, our newest team member, to fill the void.  Nina, who also happens to be Richard’s sister, has taught 2nd grade for over 30 years in Nashville and won Teacher of the Year, not once, but twice!  Nina heads the Doodlestix Advisory Panel, a group that reviews the story in each letter and provides feedback before it is mailed.  In this position, Nina plays an instrumental role in making sure each Doodlestix letter is spot on for age appropriateness, proper reading comprehension level, and content.  Basically, she makes sure that each Doodlestix letter your child receives will be “just right.”

There’s obviously a bit more to the history of Doodlestix, but I’ll save that for another post.

Posted by Matt on 09/02 at 09:48 AM
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