This is officially my second week into my new job and I LOVE it! I had to go to the staff development week before school started with all of the teachers...that was so weird. I was sitting with all of my old high school teachers all day and talking with them on a professional level and also seeing sides of them that I didn't know existed! A lot of them have personalities haha! This was also the first time that I had been in the new high school (amazing!). The high school is brand new and they turned the old one which is connected into the middle school. We had a break the first day and I was on the phone with Colton and I was just roaming around trying to get the layout of everything and I didn't even realize I was walking through the old high school! Everything looks so different, which was to be expected, but it just felt SO weird being in there again.
My title is a "Job Coach" not a "coach" as the paper read! We had to take a new staff picture that was going in the paper and once they got us lined up to take it they passed a little notepad around and told us to write our name and then our title. I was one of the last one's to receive it and I looked at how everybody else had written theirs so I knew exactly how to write it. Everyone had written it like, Abby Coates - Job Coach. That's exactly how I wrote it and the goobers at the newspaper probably thought I was saying my job was a coach because in the paper it said, Abby Coates - coach. I had so many people come up to me and telling me congratulations on my coaching position! In fact after church on Sunday several people had come and asked me about it and I had to keep explaining the situation over and over that finally when people would say "hey Abby, congratulations on your new job as a coach" I would just smile and say "thanks!"
I'm working with a special needs girl one on one everyday. She's very high functioning for her syndrome so she can have a conversation with anyone about anything and do almost everything. My job is to teach her life and job skills. So a lot of times I'll just have to direct her or help her with things but other than that she can hold her own. We follow the school schedule so M-F, 8-3. It's also nice because anytime the school has an early release or is closed so do we. And if she has a dr's appointment or anything like that we also don't meet. So thankfully the job is very low stress (exactly what I needed right now) and very flexible. Right now we volunteer at the daycare where I used to be the director, which is actually how I got the job, and at the nursing home.
I'm going to be honest, I was extremely nervous about starting this job because I've never worked with special needs and I've always heard that either you can or you can't and there is no gray area. But I'm really enjoying it! And I was also nervous about going to the nursing home, now that we've gone I don't know why, but I think everyone kind of has a bad stigma about nursing homes. In the nursing home we volunteer with the Alzheimer's wing. We're only there for a couple of hours two days a week so we really only have time to help with a few things. But they were cracking me up! There's 13 residents in that wing and I already love each and every one of them. At the daycare we spend the majority of our time in Korbyn's room of course. The girl that I'm working with actually likes that room and next room so that's why we're in there a lot. I know you're thinking it's because Korbyn's in there but I promise it's not! It's just that those are the two youngest rooms so the kids aren't as rowdy and those are the only two rooms she really wants to go in, I just got lucky :) I absolutely love spending time with Korbyn all day! But I've noticed that as soon as she sees me walk in the room she flips on her "brat" switch. Ok, so she isn't a brat but she's become SO attached to me in the past two weeks that I almost don't want to go in her room anymore. Don't get me wrong, I love that my baby is attached to me but she just follows me around the room and cries when I don't pick her up, not all the time but I feel like I'm disrupting the room when she does that! And I've also noticed that she doesn't like it when I'm holding another baby. If she sees me with another kid she'll come crawling and fighting to get into my lap. And at home she's become the same way. She just wants me to hold her all the time!
I know a lot of it has to do with her age. She's understanding who certain people are and what's going on and she's catching on pretty quick. I've noticed a couple of other things that she does that really surprise me at how much she understands. Any time she poops she comes crawling to me and will not leave me alone. She doesn't cry, she just whines a little bit but is trying to get my attention. I've learned that every time she does this to check her diaper and sure enough she has poop! (early potty trainee?!) And when she gets hungry (usually when I'm standing in the kitchen making dinner) she comes and hugs my leg and cries until I give her something to eat. Like I said, she amazes me every day. I'm just glad that I get to work while spending time with her :)
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