With record-breaking temperatures heating up the Greater Toronto Area, thank goodness for the cool wave moving through on August 11.

On August 11, visit your local Dairy Queen location to cool off by participating in Miracle Treat Day. Proceeds from every Blizzard® treat sold on August 11 will go towards your local Children’s Miracle Network Hospital, including The Hospital for Sick Children.

Place your Blizzard® order for your office or sports club in advance. Let your family and friends know that with the purchase of a Blizzard® or paper balloon, they will be supporting hospitals like SickKids. Giving never tasted so good.

Miracle Treat Day is a one-day national campaign where proceeds from Dairy Queen Blizzard® sales are donated to help make a difference in the lives of sick children. Since 1984, DQ has raised more than $84 million for Children’s Miracle Network hospitals.

Enjoy cooling off with your favourite Blizzard® flavour and support SickKids. See you on August 11 at your local Dairy Queen!

A team of our SickKids scientists submitted a proposal for an international grant competition, Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development. This competition is seeking innovative approaches for improving maternal and neonatal survival in rural regions of low-income countries. The team from SickKids are now finalists in the competition and are also up for a People’s Choice Award for the best submission to the challenge – and YOU can help them win the People’s Choice Award!

Seventy-seven finalists out of more than 600 applications have been selected to compete in the final stage of this program. Team SickKids is made up of Drs. Daniel Roth, Stan Zlotkin, Ashley Aimone and Diego Bassani of SickKids and collaborators from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baylor College of Medicine, and ICDDR,B (Bangladesh).

The project entitled, Prenatal calcium to prevent preeclampsia and preterm birth in resource-poor rural settings, is particularly innovative because they are suggesting that calcium and iron can be safely and feasibly provided together for the first time. The team proposes to develop a novel once-daily microencapsulated micronutrient powder containing iron, folic acid, and calcium (Prenatal Sprinkles) to overcome barriers to the integration of calcium into prenatal care in developing countries. If successful, their innovation – “differential time-release microencapsulation” – will mask the taste of iron and the gritty tongue-feel of calcium, and facilitate differential iron and calcium absorption.

Should the SickKids team be successful in being awarded this grant, they anticipate that Prenatal Sprinkles will be an effective means to supply supplemental calcium (and iron-folic acid) to pregnant women in rural settings, without causing adverse effects on iron absorption.

While there is still a huge process the team has to go through to receive this grant, you can help by registering and voting for them in the People’s Choice Award. This will be presented at the Saving Lives at Birth DevelopmentXChange July 27-28, 2011 in Washington, DC. 

Register an account today, and vote for your colleagues. Voting is open now until July 27 at 5 p.m.  Visit the Saving Lives at Birth website, register and vote!

What an AMAZING night!  After Hours 2011 was awesome!  The music was great, the decorations were stunning, AND there was a chocolate fountain!

Getting out of the elevator and stepping out onto the first floor was so exciting. I LOVED the red carpet that was laid out to greet us as we walked up to the registration table. 

EVERYTHING was Black & White, true to the theme! It looked beautiful! There were even TVs showing black and white movies at the back of the room, definitely completing the sophisticated and absolutely enchanting style. There was fruit, candy, a make-your-own-sundae area, and so much more! 

The greatest part was the celebs I got to meet! While getting some food to eat (dipping my  delicious strawberries into the chocolate fountain), I met Jesse Giddings, the newest MuchMusic VJ! I also got to meet so many more people from MuchMusic! Phoebe Dykstra took some amazing pics of us all dancing to A Night Like This and Electric, and she then texted them to Shawn Desman himself!!  It was like a dream come true!

Not only did I meet some amazing people from MuchMusic, but Kate Todd was there as well!  I know her best from Life With Derek, which I would watch every night at 11 p.m. as a SickKids inpatient.  She was so nice and I got some pretty awesome pictures with her!

I had an AMAZING time.  It means so much to me that so many people put so much effort into this event and I feel so lucky that I was invited to be a part of this special night.  The DJ was fabulous, the food was “dee-lish”, and all the SickKids patients there made the night as incredible and fabulous as it was.  After Hours 2011 was definitely a success!!

The After Hours Exclusive Teen Event was inspired by a teenage girl who missed her prom while undergoing treatment at SickKids. The Child Life team at SickKids turned to Ellen Storfer and her family’s Dream Delivery fund to make the teen event a reality. To learn more about the Storfer Dream Delivery Program and how you can help make more dreams come true, please visit www.sickkidsfoundation.com/dreamdelivery/stories.asp.

Thank you to Alexandra Varela for generously sharing her experience with us.