Archive for the ‘Updates on stories we’ve covered’ Category

No deadline on thank you

All I had to do was stick a couple of magazines in some envelopes and affix mailing labels. I’m not sure why it took me a month to do it. I could offer the typical excuses — deadlines, conflicting demands on my time. December, after all, is a busy month. But when I face it [...]

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Happy times and high stakes

Warm flannel pajamas and cozy slippers on a brisk December afternoon. Pizza and pretzels, cookies and lemonade. Face painters, costumed characters, crafts. The giddy abandon of parading around a place more typically associated with culture and refinement while blowing on kazoos. A play based on a favorite childhood book. A cast of characters clearly devoted to [...]

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Now we are 2

A Sesame Street-theme cake for Tesfanesh and Solomon, now 2. Tesfanesh and Solomon deGuzman — the children I first met as babies in Ethiopia — are 2 years old. They shared a birthday party Saturday with their older brother Musse (who turns 4 this week) at McCormick Stillman Railroad Park in Scottsdale. Big sister Jesmina [...]

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Adventures with the older deGuzman kids

I knew I’d finally won him over when we were singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” in the car. We were taking turns filling in the blanks: And on that farm he had a…. We’d run through the standard cow, horse, pig, chicken, duck, dog, cat. It was Musse’s turn to pick. And on that [...]

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A patient entertainer

He’d just had his spleen removed and he was still a bit woozy from the anesthesia. But 10-year-old Ellington King was game when child life specialist Sarah Maurer asked him, and his mom, if we could stop by to visit. I was at Phoenix Children’s Hospital with RAK staff photographer Dan Friedman, shadowing Sarah and [...]

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A welcome "thank you," just for doing our job

Friday afternoons are typically very quiet at our office. For those of us who crave uninterrupted time to check things off our respective “to do” lists, it’s the best time of the week. Last Friday, there was an unexpected bit of activity in our front reception area as a smiling gentleman arrived with a huge [...]

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Make my day: Dena Reany's summer vacation

Not a lot I can add to this, which came across my email in the middle of a challenging, get-the-magazine-to-the-printer day and gave me just the smile I needed. Dear Karen and everyone at Raising Arizona Kids, Just a quick thank you to all of you for choosing us for the MAY cover for your [...]

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Everybody dance now!

It was staff multimedia journalist Vicki Balint’s idea, not mine. But I promised to be a good sport. We were at The Salvation Army day camp in Chandler to interview Kendall Glover, the 11-year-old hometown dance sensation who placed second in the finals of a national competition for the CBS program “Live to Dance.” My [...]

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An update on the deGuzman kids, as their mom prepares to return to Ethiopia

Keri deGuzman will board a plane tomorrow morning bound for Washington, D.C. On Thursday, she will check in at the Ethiopian Airlines counter at Dulles International Airport. On Friday morning, she will arrive in Addis Ababa — her fourth trip to the capital of a resource-rich but infrastructure-poor country where more than four million children [...]

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A "snow day" at RAK

When I got to work Thursday morning I could tell it was going to be one of “those” days. Sadie Smeck, our editorial intern, couldn’t get onto the Internet. Then Calendar & Directories Editor Mala Blomquist couldn’t access any of our internal network drives. Then Marketing Director MaryAnn Ortiz-Lieb called in from a meeting to [...]

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