music, therapy, and me

It is almost here - I am going to spend the evening and tomorrow in the company of fellow paperfolk - a crop weekend! I have never done this before, and I am both excited and queasy when I think about what I am about to do. I no longer scrapbook the way I used to - too much space to cover for a book that is not really easy to move around, so I am not sure if the projects that I have available will actually be okay. I mean, I know that the purpose of this weekend is to just engage in some crafting, but I want to fit in and make friends. That is the part that is excruciating for me - the wanting to make friends. Anyway, I will be constructing a new trip book. The one I made several years ago during my March Christmas visit is almost full. I will be filling it up with the events of this past summer - I didn't travel, but I was host to my aunt, sister, and mother once, and then my Mom came back for my surgery, so the summer months were busy. Once I can sit down and journal all of that,...

 Here you go! A demonstration of my new TMEs by the Numbers file in my TPT store! Available for free!!

So, here is the deal. I have come up with a system to boost my creativity when it comes to writing therapeutic music experiences (TMEs). Of course, I can't upload the video file that I just put together to get you to see what I'm talking about, so this entire post is just a practice in futility. Ugh. Anyway, my dice have dictated that I write a chant that focuses on motor skill development, in an AB form, using Orff/Keyboard instruments, for the month of November, and working additionally on oral motor and speech skills. I also rolled that I should do things in the key of F, but that has nothing to do with a chant, so that dice result is moot! (Thank goodness!) Gak! While this has been a good way to help spur my creativity when it comes to writing TMEs, this is not the best time to be engaging in this practice. I will work on it a bit more this afternoon after my five sessions are finished. I tweaked my finger (the one that's been broken twice by clients) yesterday. I will ...

Usually, I do a Make It thing on Mondays, but I didn't make much this weekend, so there really isn't much to report on. I cut out some gift tag materials and straightened up the floor in the office/craft area but that was all. I did lots of online shopping and have some logistical shipping problems to solve, but that's okay. I like challenges.  So, all that to state that I am not going to share something that I have made this week. I am just going to talk about getting ready for our next break. It is only twelve days away. Twelve angst-ridden, scream-filled, disappointment brewing, stressful days. The biggest problem that we as the faculty of the school have is that our Behavioral Health Technicians (BHTs) do not get a break and have to face two weeks of non-school programming without us including two major holidays. It makes it awkward to feel happy about getting some time off. Guilt over. Time to move into some gratitude. I am grateful that I can navigate this time of yea...

'Tis the season when I am inundated by the sounds of the holiday season - everywhere you go... I am going out into the world of retail later this morning to see if I can find some things for my Mom's holiday and birthday. While I am out, I am sure that I will be hearing versions of holiday music while strolling up and down the aisles of my local stores. I tend to avoid stores during this season, mainly because I am not a fan of crowds, but also because the sounds get to be overwhelming. I get tired of the entire holiday hoopla, but it is better now that I am not stressing about extra church services and many programs. I have to get some things for my Mom's stocking, so I have to head outside of my home for the express purpose of shopping. Thankfully, there is drive-up service as well as online ordering, so I can keep most of my shopping where I want it - away from the constant musical bombardment of holiday music! That being said, my favorite song of the season is a hymn ca...

Okay. It is crunch time now. Fifteen days between us and winter break. Let me tell you, folks, working with children this time of year is not for the faint-hearted! There is just not enough time, energy, or words to explain what happens in schools between Thanksgiving and winter holidays. If you have never worked in a school during this time, then kindly just nod your head in sympathy when a school teacher or therapist expresses their levels of exhaustion and/or overwhelm. My week started with a horrible day - all of my clients were disgruntled and snarly. The week has progressed into more kind conversations and emotional expressions, but the noise level in the class next door is very loud - which is very unusual! We are having constant shifts in classroom composition both with students and with staff members, and we no longer communicate these changes with all school staff members. I have not had the expected staff members in most of my sessions this week. That changes how I do things...

I am not looking forward to work today. On Monday, the groups that I see twice a week were just plain old mean and nasty to each other and to me. I hope that they will be a bit nicer to each other today, but I am not anticipating that things will change significantly. Once I get back here from work, I will have a meeting with a couple of people to start planning for a new symposium. It will be a late night, but it should be a productive one! Is it only Wednesday? Seventeen days left before break. I hope that I can do it without taking time out, but who knows. To add to my list of stressors, I have required that I eat things from my home rather than getting food from other sources this month. It has become way too easy to justify getting food delivered while I am still shopping for food to put in my pantry. So, I am making myself heat things up. Yesterday's dinner was a taco salad - quick, easy, and no extra money spent on food. It also means spending some time meal prepping on the ...

I am a music therapist who gets creative blocks at times, and that fact just annoys me. I do not like it when I cannot create something just whenever I want or need to do so, and I have explored many different ways to spur my creativity over my many years as a music therapist. The other day, I grabbed a set of Dungeons and Dragons dice at Five Below. I have followed several people on various social media platforms who use these to make decisions - I especially enjoy Roll for Sandwich - check it out! I thought that this could be a good format for me, and I turned it into a couple of therapeutic music experiences (TMEs) already! Now, I have released this as a free resource in my TPT store . (It will not always be free - get it now!!) You have to have an account in TPT to access the information, but signing up is free and there are tons of free resources that music therapists can use and adapt.  Here's how it works. I have determined a criterion for each die value. Each die has a diff...

There are nineteen days between now and the end of the work month for me. Fifteen of those days are work days, and I am getting ready for the last winter break of my career (probably). This is a year of lasts for me. I will be retiring from my current job and transitioning into another role as a music therapy professional at the end of my contract year. This is my last December as a school-based music therapist, and I am both happy and nostalgic about it all. If you know anyone who works in school settings, then you know that this is one of the most difficult times of the year - in ANY school. In my school, things are compounded by it being a residential and day setting for children, adolescents, and young adults who have significant developmental and psychiatric symptomology. Amplify the usual pre-holiday excitement with trauma backgrounds and the uncertainty of family involvement and you get the miasma that my students bring to their music therapy sessions this time of year. Meanwhil...

Today is Saturday, and I am trying to figure out a priority for today. Yesterday, I ended up making the start of some dinner meals by cooking two pounds of hamburger and then separating it into containers for easy use during the next three weeks. That is all that is between us and Winter Break. I am looking forward to the next three weeks. We are supposed to be getting snow at some point in the next three days, and I am sure that it is the start of a good winter season. I am happier in these cold, dark times than I am when it is hot and humid outside. So, bring on the snow and the darkness. I just finished ripping another book of CDs to my computer. There is something quite nice about making sure that I have my music available to me whenever I want, but it is also a bit of a chore to sit and watch while the music gets translated into another digital format. I currently have over 20,000 music pieces in my library, and I have about three more CD cases to go before I am finished. I guess ...

Today is a day off, and other than some online shopping with my Mom and Sister later, I do not intend on leaving my house at all for any sort of consumer action. Black Friday deals are not for me! Instead, I am making small books for my co-workers that share the music therapy space at work. One is a recipe book and the other is a future adventures book. I hope they will like them, and it will give me a chance to explore my creativity through making something that I love to make - small journals and books. One of the things that has really sustained my music therapy professional journey is cultivating hobbies that are not related to music at all!  I love making journals, and I make them out of all sorts of things. Right now, I am in the design phase of my thinking about all of this. I have to figure out how to make a recipe book. It will be easier to set up the future adventures book, but there are other considerations for that book than the recipe book. It will be a good challenge!...

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States where I live, and I woke up with a feeling of gratefulness and thankfulness that I haven't felt for some time.  As I have explained, this is not really my favorite holiday of the year - mainly because of the way our capitalistic society has taken it and turned it into a day of overindulgence and spending for the upcoming Christmas holiday - but I do like the original thoughts behind it all. I like having a day where the focus is supposed to be on thinking about the things that we have rather than the things we want to acquire. So, I woke up and felt good about today and the things that I have, the people I love and who have loved me, and for the future for myself and for others. I hope this Thanksgiving optimism lasts for the rest of this season. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate.

Have you ever had your creative and intellectual property stolen by someone? I have, and it was devastating! Someone passed off a song that they learned at their internship (which was my internship as well) as their own in a professional conference presentation. I couldn't believe that they stole my song by taking credit for it when it was complimented, but I heard her say, "Thanks, I wrote that song in my internship." Nope. I WROTE THAT SONG IN MY INTERNSHIP! I graduated before this person started, but it was MY SONG, not hers! As a result of that one comment where someone took credit for something that belonged to me, I have been a voracious defender of copyright protections ever since. I strive to find the original sources for every song that I use in my sessions. This is because I always remember that situation and do not want to take credit for something that is not mine to begin with. So, I am a bit of a researcher into copyright issues and how to avoid complication...

Today is the Monday before Thanksgiving - a forlorn space in a school therapy setting and twice as challenging in a school space in a psychiatric residential treatment facility like mine. There are two days before a five-day weekend break from school, and that causes additional problems for the staff who are required to work the holiday and for those of us who are required to leave. It is always an interesting time, and I am going in to do ten sessions with students and staff members who are not happy to be doing anything. I am debating what I want to do this week with my clients, and I think I have decided that we will throw splash balls at drums. This tends to be a good, non-speech centered TME that allows us to hit something that will not hit back and that can allow us to express some of our frustrations. I will get all of my drums out, and we will throw balls and continue until we are tired. It is a low planning, high reward type of TME, and it requires very little preparation on m...

It is time for the song of the week. One of my favorite, obscure holiday songs comes from Bing Crosby. It is called Christmas Dinner, Country Style, and it is set to a square dance format. Now, it might be the three years that we square danced in physical education (fourth, seventh, and ninth grades) that draws me to this song, but I enjoy it. I especially like the way it provides a focus to thaning Mother after the meal is prepared and presented. There is a space for gratitude that is missing in many things - songs, ideas, and the ways we view holidays in particular. I would like to make this into a Thanksgiving song, and I might just do that. While Bing's version functions as a Christmas song, I feel like there aren't enough Thanksgiving songs out in the world, so why not make more? This holiday that is coming up is not one of my favorites, but I do like the idea behind it - taking a day to be grateful for what I have and who I love. I have not had a "traditional Thanksg...

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...