Enthusiastically Eclectic

In my therapy sessions for my Masters program, I've noticed that even young girls have cultivated "The Silent Treatment." One of my girls needed to make up a session she had missed, so I pulled her with one of my better-natured, easygoing boys about her own age and with similar goals. We were doing a sensory activity that tends to make the boy (we'll call him "Randy") very silly. Randy has an Autism diagnosis and is one of my favorite students to teach because we do sensory activities all the time. I am a very tactile person anyway, so his session is like a work-play session for me. The little girl ("Sarah") is usually very mature and has frequently informed me that the activities I have planned are "for babies." She is also good natured, but in a very different way. The other day, Randy was busy wiggling and crowing over the toys we were describing and then burying in a box of dried beans, when Sarah stopped dead in the middle of one of ...

My grandmother has early-stage dementia. We recently moved her out of her home in Austin, Texas, where she had lived for the last 25 years. Unfortunately, my grandmother was also a hoarder, so that process was more difficult than it would have been in any case. She now lives quite happily in a semi-independent assisted living facility here in the Dallas area, but is progressively having difficulty with her memory. Today, my mother, grandma, and I were all out of our separate domiciles for a girl's day. We do this often on Sundays. We had lunch, did a little shopping, and enjoyed  Oz the Great and Powerfu l (which was fantastic). Everything was relatively uneventful except our shopping trip: we misplaced Grandma. We shopped for some warm-weather clothes and a dress for Grandma to wear to my upcoming wedding, and once my grandmother's needs were met, my mom and I did a little shopping for ourselves. We asked my grandmother to sit in a chair just outside the fitting rooms whil...

Holy stressed-out student, Batman! By student, I mean me. I am working on my Masters in Speech-Language Pathology (SLP). If you ever want to see hundreds of (in my case overwhelmingly female) professionals freaking out about cheap pencils, pens, t-shirts, popcorn bags, and other items that have a company name on them nobody will ever read, go to a professional convention. Seriously, there were about twenty males at the conference I attended today, and many of those were working the vendor booths. Some snazzy guys even had tuxedos on! I must have missed the memo. I discovered today that large groups of people pressing together make my shoulders creep up around my ears like an ill-fitting turtleneck. My ears then start to burn like I've had too much wine and someone told that embarrassing story my dad loves to tell. You know, that story everyone thinks is soooo amusing about how he found me balanced on the rim of a huge garbage can full of dry dog food snacking on kibble when I was...