Play your instrumet, play your instrument, play your instrument and pass it to the left! May 22, 2009

So,

I am getting very tired of putting up with people’s bullshit.  Very tired.

School is going great.  It’s making me think that I don’t want to do Early Intervention, but we’ll see.  I have 28 kids on my caseload.  I see most of them 3 times a week and the rest twice a week.  I don’t really like doing the big groups with the Intermediate AU class, but you do what you gotta do.  Wednesdays are really hard because from 12 until 2:30, I see 5 groups of AU kids back to back.  The last one is actually one boy, but he’s worse than my hardest group, times ten.  If you didn’t know what autism was, I’d show him to you.  My office/therapy room (which is actually pretty big) is right next to one of the primary autism classes, so it’s always super loud and I can always hear him yelling.  When I see him, we always end up on the floor, crawling around, picking him up, pulling him out from under the table, etc.  Today I found a radio in the room and listened to classical music for about an hour during my break.  It was nice.  Yesterday I had one of the AU kids freak out on me.  Before speech, his teacher had told me that he was having a tough day.  Note: this should always make you nervous-autistic kids having particularly bad days.  So he came to the session a little late.  One of the things I do is make PowerPoint instruction books with photos for any art projects that we do.  We were making ladybugs yesterday and there was one small step that I didn’t think was important enough to make a page for.  Well.  I learned to not ignore that next time.  When I told the kid that was having a bad day that we had to do something not in the book, he went crazy and started yelling/crying- “YOU HAVE TO TURN THE PAGE!  YOU CAN”T DO THAT!  THAT’S NOT IN THE BOOK! NOOOOOOO!”  It was bad.  Then there’s this other boy who always thinks other kids are copying him.  When he picks orange and one of the other kids picks orange, he fixates on how that kid is copying him.  He grabs the paper and for 30 minutes he keeps on returning to the same thought.  I just finished writing a social story about copying.  So that should be better.  In the Int. class there’s one kid that’s super low and he yells and jumps around and yeeeah.  The teacher put him in the bathroom for like 15 minutes and stood with her back on the door so he couldn’t get out.  He was pounding and yelling and I couldn’t believe it.  But I was told that that is normal for him.

I was looking at the menu at The Pump Room, which is the restuarant in the hotel I’ll be staying at in Chicago.  I saw that they have a bottle of wine that costs $1100.  Over ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS!  Wowee.  I’m excited that I’ll get a gigantic room with my very own king bed that’s part of Chicago’s Gold Coast (one of the nicest parts of Chicago).  And the thing is that it’s not much more expensive than my teeny NYC hotel room.

-Me

May 12, 2009

I graduated on Saturday!  And today was my first day as a speech-language pathologist!  I forgot to eat lunch at school and then when I got home, I couldn’t stop eating.  And I’m super tired.  But it was fun, except for one AU kid who was really difficult to work with.  I booked my flight/hotel for Chicago.  I leave early on June 15th (Monday) and get back late on the 17th (Wednesday).  I’ll be staying at the Ambassador East Hotel!  Woohoo.  But now I’m too tired to write more and I still have to lesson plan.

May 5, 2009

So,

I’m watching One Tree Hill right now and Peyton was making a “just in case” video/box of stuff to leave her baby in case she dies.  There are times I wish that my mom could have done or written something that I would have found after she died.  Instead, we just kept being normal until about two weeks before she died.  I know that there are lots of good things about just living like everything is normal.  But at the same time, I feel like everybody but my brother and I knew how bad it all was.  I found a poem she had cut out of the newspaper-it’s one of those don’t cry for me when I’m gone poems that’s super sad.

Anyway.  I had a phone interview with a private practice in Chicago.  When I first talked to the guy last week, he told me that originally they didn’t want a CF but then they changed their minds.  I’m thinking that they saw that I speak Polish in my resume and that’s why they changed their minds.  And after my phone interview, I’m even more sure.  They told me that they get referrals all the time, but they have to turn people down because they don’t have a pediatric SLP who speaks Polish.  When I told them that I’ll need to work on my grammar, they told me that it doesn’t matter because with EI, I’d only be working on like putting two words together.  So I’ll know Thursday or Friday whether they liked me or not.

-Me