music, therapy, and me

No one is happy at work right now. There are so many emotions happening that are just hard to navigate. Kids are upset because they are not going home. Kids are happy because they are going home. Kids are jealous because their peers are going home and they are not. Behavioral Health Technicians (BHTs) are angry because teachers get a five-day weekend, and they have to work the holiday. Teachers are just trying to get to that holiday. There is no sense of team or working together right now. I do not know, at any given moment, who will be coming into my sessions these days. The BHTs I am expecting are just not with the groups I expect them to be in. It is hard to navigate constant changes while still trying to come up with therapeutic enrichment for clients. Things work so much easier when the BHTs know the students really well rather than coming in and not knowing things like typical responses or communication styles... Oof. This is a rough time for everyone involved in education, but w...

Me in one of the formal portraits  Today is the last Thursday that I work in the month of November. Next week's Thursday is a day off, and I am looking forward to the break. My focus for my five-day weekend is to organize the music room with some of the things that I am bringing home from work. Other than that, I am expecting some extra napping and many different television shows. After this, there are only three more Thursdays before our winter break and the start of the new year. We have been doing our Musicians of the Month listening (music awareness) and leisure choice options (executive functioning and life-long leisure skill development). My other groups are getting an introduction to guitars and then some leisure choice options. My students do not know how to play. It is interesting to watch them just stare into space instead of trying something new or even get something familiar from the cabinets. I mean, I have just about everything. The most used materials are my hot whee...

I tried to write yesterday, but I was unable to do it. I was late to rise and did not have much ability to think. I am better this morning, but I am stressed about all sorts of things. I cannot really put a finger on anything, but the stress is there... lurking behind the scenes. I've finished the tasks that I needed to get done for OCMT, and now I am thinking more about my own business status. That's right. I now have a business of my own - duly registered with the state and with the IRS. I anticipate that I will earn about $15 in this quarter, so I am guessing I will not have to pay too much in taxes, but you never know. I am already on the junk mail lists. Ugh. It amazes me how quickly information is released to others. Anyway, bank accounts are next on my list of things to do. I have to close one at one bank and open another at another bank. I have a spreadsheet to help me figure out what I should be doing when it comes to taxes. I also have a symposium to organize as well ...

On Friday, I put 20 file folder activities into the boxes of four classrooms. It was a huge stack of binder pages with various matching, communication, letter sound, and errorless tasks. I also gave away about 12 safety sign mini folders to another group of classrooms. All of this while the HVAC people have to crawl around in my ceiling so my office is disordered to make space for them. I find it ironic that my broken HVAC system is controlled from my office ceiling space. It took them about 3 years to even find the hub and now people have to interfere with my planning, preparation, and office space to make my room feel very hot or very cold. There is no inbetween. It is really annoying right now because they have smushed my desk space. I cannot get in there easily because they have to access the ceiling system several times a day. It is now time to put some finishing touches on some social stories that I have downloaded that are all about school. I need to take my binding machine in t...

I REALLY wanted to write over the past two days, but I was thwarted in my desire due to a couple of internet outages in my area. Stuff went down on midnight on Friday morning, and I woke up for some reason to experience the outage in real time. You don't realize how many things are internet dependent until the internet doesn't work. So, I had to go a DAY AND A HALF without my links to the outside world and to the work that I love!! Wow - my privilege is showing, isn't it? I have become accustomed to having the world at my fingertips, and it is hard to navigate a world where I cannot access what I want to access when I want to do it! So, I am searching for songs about being disconnected - from the world, from other people, from things I need to do and want to accomplish. Off I go to the Google machine to find songs about this topic. The first one that shows up is Disconnected by Keane. Then another one - Disconnected by Anna Clendening. Okay, this is a start. I can tell you ...

Well, good morning from this side of the time anxiety. It is now 5:48 am, and I am just now sitting down to write anything at all. I did not get out of bed until 5 am because I just didn't want to move. Now, I am in panic mode as I am thinking about my usual 6 am departure from work. I was at work an entire hour after the stop time after arriving 30 minutes early, so now I have some conflicting emotions. I have already worked more than I need to work but I still have the need to be on the way early. There is nothing of much import happening today. Just four groups and a meeting. That's all. I just want to sleep in my pjs all day, but that cannot happen. Only nine more work days until our next holiday break of five days straight. I can make it through. I can! I'm feeling the pull of retirement more and more these days. Seven months and two weeks to go. I'm late, but that's okay. No one pays attention to when I arrive or depart except my suite mates. I just don't ...

Well, at the moment, I do not like Tuesdays off from work for holidays. It will be interesting to see what my Wednesday group members act like with a day off from the structure of school in the middle part of the week. I have forgotten to do some tasks that I needed to do and done others that I did not need to get done right now. It has been a strange week, to be sure. I can't blame the Tuesday off for my scattered thoughts. That's all me. I was scattered before this time and am scattered right now. Lots of fun to be had with menopausal brain function, let me tell you! Anyway, I am sitting here after a scattered sleep night waiting to take a shower and get ready to go to work. Apparently, there were northern lights happening last night - I tossed and turned through them without knowing what was going on out there. I did have the fleeting thought that I should go outside more, but I was already in my pjs, so I didn't. Obviously, I should have gone outside, even in the cold n...

I am currently working on a coping skills song - one that explains a bit about what that catch phrase has come to mean in therapy for folks who do not always understand these things. I have finished the chorus, but the verses are taking a bit more of my time. I want this song to explain something because my students seem to hate the phrase, "use your coping skills" and often escalate into bigger behaviors of concern when that phrase is used during the upward climb of the crisis cycle. I find that we do not explain what we mean with this phrase well enough for our clients to understand what we do when we need to find our patience with daily annoyances. This has made me think about my personal coping skills and how I am frustrated quite a bit by work these days. That is neither here nor there this morning, though. This is a day off, and I am going to focus on my "Next Step" plan today - well, that and the dishes that really need to be washed and the broken dishwasher....

During the Music for Kiddos symposium on Friday, I started a lapbook template to make the creation of my lapbooks a bit more standardized. It is nothing fancy - it's just blocks at the moment, but it is a place to start. I have to tweak it a bit because my measurements did not quite fit the space available, but it is a start. I am all about working smarter and not harder, and I have found that making templates are easy ways to streamline some of my creative processes. Having a structure to work with helps me work. For the lapbook, I have a template for pieces to put together into the books for different ideas and different themes. To make things easier for me, I also print out things on sticker paper. It takes away the gluing step for the inner portions of the folder which is helpful. So, I am going to keep working on this idea, even through other types of creativity and work. I have made a pledge to myself that I am going to get to work on time this week. So, I have to work throug...

I am finishing up the last session of the Music for Kiddos Symposium before I head over to complete the course evaluation and get my certificate. I could not face that session on the day - it was just a bit too much to concentrate on during that specific time. I just needed a small break after the six presentations that I watched on Friday. Today, I have to get through all of this just to finish it all. I have started some things that I should (goblin alert) have done many years ago. I registered my "business" as an LLC yesterday. It was a payment and a form filed with the State. That was it, as far as I can find these days. I will have to do some business things with the city - DBA, and licenses - but those cannot be accomplished until I have an Employer Identification Number and some new bank accounts. Those are tasks for this next week.  It is time to get my "business" going. I've had the website for 30 years, and I have not made it into anything that makes m...

It is the Music for Kiddos symposium day! I am at home, sitting in front of my computer in my pjs, and getting ready for a day of learning. I do not have to go to work today, so I am taking a leisurely morning. I will have 11 hours of continuing education to get through by the end of today. That's lots of time to sit in front of the computer, so I might not watch everything today. I prefer watching things live, but if my body cannot handle it, then my body cannot handle it. It is always nice when there is an opportunity to watch via recording later on. I wonder if I can get my little laptop to stream while I use my big computer for working on other tasks... Ideally, I would be able to watch the symposium on my television, but I haven't figured out how to screencast things to my older televisions. I know that there has to be a way, but I have started this a bit too late to figure it out right now. A quick search of my Roku has identified some screen mirroring apps, but they requ...

I am always happier in this time of year than I am in the summer months. For some reason, my seasonal affective depression is related to the sunshine. I don't know if this is because of my vitamin D deficiency, or if I was conditioned due to my early years in Texas where it was hot and humid, but summer is not a good time for me. I flourish so much more in the autumn and winter months when it is chilly, cold, and dark. I know that more people have the opposite response to this time change and the upcoming season. I am seeing so many conversations about how it is difficult for them to navigate these dark days. Meanwhile, I am gaining energy. This has been a typical week in my music therapy life. Kids have been up and down when responding to what I am sending out into the music therapy session. Many of the students have entered the room in full-out tantrums. I don't know if they were angry about having to come to music therapy or if there were other things happening, but it was m...

I have to take a late day today because I did not take my evening medications until late last night. I'm glad I remembered them when I did because they have some withdrawal symptoms that I do not want to have to go through during my Wednesday sessions.  Anyway, that means that I have some leftover symptoms that interfere with my driving, so I have to take a late day. This means that I will not arrive until around 7:45. My large chunk of time for yesterday's documentation is gone when I arrive at this time, but I have been early (before 7am) the other two days of this week, so I feel like I have given my extra time this week already. I have a meeting after school, so staying for my 8 hours will not be a chore. I got a stack of laminating back from our work-ready program, so I am set to make more educational visuals for clients in their classrooms. That is my happy place at work these days - making visuals in my office area while listening to shows on my Kindle. I have a little b...

So, as you know if you have been reading my blog for some time, I have a way that I organize my ideas into therapeutic music experiences (TMEs - my verbiage for the things that I do with my clients during our sessions). It is a way that helps me reflect on my processes, music and use of musical elements, and how I can assist my clients in reaching their goals. This form and process has changed over the years - stretched to accommodate my understanding of music as a therapeutic medium as well as contracting to change how I present said ideas to others. It continues to do so, but the basic structure is the same. For today's post, I am showing you how I explain this process to other music therapists. This is a written medium, so it seems a bit dry when reading, but I hope that this resource offers you some insight into what each section means for me when I am sitting down to design TMEs for my clients and for other clients out in the world. Comments, reactions, and questions are alway...

I have ideas.  I have so many ideas for what I want to do as well as for how to do it, but I am stuck in task paralysis and can't find the impetus to start anything. So, here I am. looking at all the stuff to make my ideas come to fruition, but without anything to show for it all. Once I start the process, things go really easily, but getting started can be daunting. For the moment, I am just collecting ideas without getting too nervous about not making them realities. This is a good time of year for me. I do much better in the cool and the cold than I do in the heat and humidity. It is a cozy time of year, and I enjoy that. There is the promise of getting home and being all snuggly in my craft space where I can experiment with paper and laminate visual aids and make new things. I did work on a page in my art journal yesterday. It is not quite finished yet. I have to glue things down and decide if I need more to add or not. I also prepared some prism crystals to add to my current l...

Ah. The week after Halloween. It is but a brief respite of the angst and anxiety that is brought up by the simple fact that all of our holidays in October, November, and December are family-oriented and most of my clients are far away from their families. The next two months will be hectic as some clients will have planned visits and others will not. The first hurdle, Halloween, is now over. This week, Halloween songs were played the most in my music therapy clinic. Well, that's not entirely true. They were sung the most during the past week. I sang several song books during sessions. We sang about old ladies who swallowed bats (I don't like the ending of that one - I think I will change it up next time I sing it) and about pumpkins rolling around as well as about spiders, ghosts, and witches. So many holiday songs that are now over. It is now time to shift gears a bit. I will have two four day workweeks in a row followed by a five day workweek and then a two day workweek this ...

There are two good things about this Halloween - first, it falls on a Friday which means that I will be at home when my clients wake up from a fun-over. I do not have to wrangle them into post-holiday music therapy sessions after a break in their schedules. The second thing is that I live in a part of town that does not have many kids, so I do not have to buy any candy to hand out. In fact, my lights will be turned off this evening. I am not a fan of this holiday, so I am thankful it is almost over. My Halloween sessions have gone over with a resounding sigh this week. No one has been really interested except for the last two groups which means that I finally got into my groove during the last two groups. I have ideas for how to make my Halloween carols a bit more interactive for those with limited communication opportunities, and I will put them into place to release on TPT before Halloween next year. I love it when ideas pop into my head this way! I do not have a costume. I think I w...

I am getting ready for the Music for Kiddos Symposium which will be happening eight days from now. I signed up as soon as I could to save a bit of money, and this will be most of my professional development for this year. I have never attended one of these before, so I am interested to see who is presenting and what they are presenting about. A friend of mine is also attending - I don't know if she will be able to do the live presentation or not, but we will be watching the same things eventually. That's kinda cool. I am experiencing lots of "lasts" these days. I am getting ready to retire from my job as the staff music therapist after almost 30 years of working in a job that I thought I would have for, at the most, 5 years. Surprise! As I am gearing up for my last Halloween parade, I am in a nostalgic mood - very much affected by the massive headache caused by skeletal misalignment. My spine is giving me fits again, so I am hurting up and down. That's neither he...

Well, it is Wednesday. This day used to be the exact center of my week. I had as many sessions ahead as I did behind me when I reached Wednesday, but that is not the way things are now. Now, Wednesday means that I have finished 10 sessions and have 11 sessions ahead of me. It is almost the middle of my therapy week, but not quite. I have five sessions on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. I have four sessions on Thursdays, and two sessions on Fridays. It's not a perfect schedule for me, but it is what I have to work with, so I do it. This schedule is much better than the one where session times were staggered throughout the day - that one just scrambled my brain for the year we had to do it. No session ended on the hour or the half hour. They do now because it was just too confusing to do a staggered schedule. There are some things that we do for the benefit of ourselves, and getting the schedule back onto a system of switching on the hour and the half hour was for the staff rather...

Every so often, I am reminded that simple is often better than elaborate. Sure, visual aids are wonderful for reinforcing concepts and assisting with comprehension, but my feeling is that any therapeutic music experience has to be able to work without those aids. Visuals are to enhance the music, not take over for it. If the music doesn't work without the visual aid, then the music becomes the secondary therapeutic medium - an enhancement, if you will. This week, we are listening to the music of performers born in this month. We have been also playing instruments. I have been selecting the instruments this week rather than letting my clients pull whatever they want from the cabinets, and I've picked some strange ones as well as some really cool instruments that are often overlooked. After a very short demonstration for the unfamiliar instruments, we go into selecting songs and playing instruments. I do not use any visual aids in this part of our interaction, but the next part, ...

I am currently trying to figure out how to release a free file to all of you, but I am getting bogged down in the details of how to get this going. I have the file ready, but I am unsure how to get you to that file. I can do it through a quick website update, but I need some time to do that website update. This is causing me to change some plans, but that is fine. Anyway, is anyone up for a November freebie? I am going to release information about a free resource this week. I am. I just need to get things organized on my side of things. In the meantime, I am getting ready for (ugh) Spirit Week and Halloween at work. I am going to share my Halloween resources with groups this week after we talk about our October Musicians of the Month. I have books, carols, games, and all sorts of Halloween-ish stuff. I am working on the pattern for a Halloween lapbook, but that will probably not be ready to share by Friday. It is spurring my creativity, though. I love lapbooks, but I haven't produc...

I am sitting on my sofa in my front room, waiting for the rain to arrive, and eating noodles. I am blogging a bit later than usual because it is Sunday, and I don't have anything to do.  Well, as always, that isn't true, but I have no outside obligations which is very nice. I could go to see Tron, but I am not all that interested in leaving my house. It was another long night - something is going on with my sleeping patterns, but I am not stressing about it. This all brings me to this Sunday's song. As I write these posts, I spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out what to write about. It varies from day to day and mood to mood. I spend time brainstorming and trying to figure things out, but I never know if anyone else even cares about what I write. This always brings me back to the songs that I keep just for me. The one that I will always keep for my own benefit and use without sharing it with clients is Dar Williams' What Do You Hear in These Sounds?  I love thi...