music, therapy, and me

Today is the day. Today is the day where my next school year officially starts (for contract purposes, the official start date was July 1, but this is the time when all the folks who don't have to do extended school schedules starts, so it is the first day of the new school year!), and I woke up at the correct time, got out of bed, have done some of my morning routine (a bit out of order, but still), and now I am ready to move into this new year. I have a day full of training ahead of me, and I'll be trying desperately to stay engaged during some of that training, but I think I am ready to go. Today is the day for declaring my clinical goals for this next school year. Yep, that's right - even 27 years into my career, I still have professional clinical goals that I address for my own therapeutic skill development just like I did as a music therapy student. I hope that I am not alone in this practice - I think we all should identify areas where we need to focus our study...

Breaks are always guilt-ridden times for me. I sit in my house thinking about all the things I should be doing, and I tend to fall into a pattern of self-defeat because I see all the things that need to be done, but I don't do them. Maybe a better way of doing all that I want to get done is to list the things that I have actually done during the first four days of this break. I went through all my fiction books and took out the books that I no longer want. Some of these are silly romance novels, some are science fiction/fantasy that are just parts of entire series, some are the duplicates that my Mom has collected and shared with me, and many of them are silly books from the Dollar Tree that I picked up because I can't seem to walk past a book shelf without getting something... The dishes are almost finished. I have about a quarter of a dishwasher load left to go. This has freed up much of my counter space, so I've done some work on my kitchen surfaces. I've start...

I am heading back to work this week after a week off for Spring Break. Not much happened this past week - things were all about resting - and now it is time to get back into the morning routine that I started in February...that was interrupted many times in February due to inclement weather days...and that seems to serve me well, so I want to reestablish that particular routine. Here's the deal. I am an early riser and once I am up, I am ready to get going. There is very little sleeping in or snoozing in my home because my eyes pop open and off I go. I am one of those annoying morning people who just do best in the early morning hours. I tend to wake up about 4am most mornings. Lately, I've been waking up at about 2am no matter when I go to sleep. I would like to get back into the routine of waking up at 4am rather than at 2am. My evening routine tends to have little to no effect on my morning routine - if I go to sleep at midnight, I still wake up at 4am (or 2am) - I am ju...

Do you remember, WAAAY back to last Saturday when I started talking about how I use my time? I decided to do an informal time study to see where I could change some routines and make better use of my time. (Here's the link to the post , if you want to read and catch up.) Well, I did complete my little chart and what I found was pretty interesting. I was awake longer than I thought I would be (still not grown-up bedtimes, but later than infant bedtimes!), but I was actually in bed very early every night except for Wednesday where I had to work a VERY long day and didn't get to my home until after I am usually snoring away. What does this tell me? That I am tired. Of course, I already knew that, but this really did exemplify that my job is wearing my body out. I have some work to do to make myself more prone to being out of my bed rather than crawling back to recline. Maybe it is time to get some different seating to encourage me to remain up and out of my favorite comfortab...

I currently have WAY too many ideas in my idea book that I want to do but don't have time to get finished. This happens to me quite often during these winter months. The summer months tend to be my time to stagnate and become less interested in finishing things, but the winter months are my time to create and dream and try to keep up with the flow of things that come into my brain at random times. Right now, my idea list has the following projects on it: a new CMTE course for internship directors and supervising music therapists - four out of 10 modules outlined awaiting Powerpoint and videos sing about March - three out of five TMEs written and formatted. Visual aids are uploaded to Teachers Pay Teachers - still need one more visual aid to go with a TME that needs to be written. proposals for two music therapy opportunities - one is local, one is not. I'm thinking through things like fees, possibilities, and what I can offer to other music therapists as I go into thi...