Happy holidays, everyone. I am taking a break from posting and updating until some time in the first or second week of The New Year!
Have a great holidays!
The More We Get Together
The four-year-olds’ church choir I co-direct had their Christmas program tonight. Parents, grandparents, and siblings were in attendance. What sweethearts. This year is my first as co-director, and I’ve had a lot of fun with these kids.
Happy holiday-time programs and celebrations to you!
Contributing blogger
I am excited to announce that before the end of the month (and this calendar year, for that matter), a piece I wrote will be posted on a child development site that I will link to once the site goes live. I will be contributing blog posts on a variety of subjects regarding childhood development and how music can aid in such a process. Please feel free to offer any topics on your mind that you believe would be beneficial to offer an international audience. I do have a series of pieces pre-composed, but am always looking for more fodder.
Once the site goes live, I will be sure to link to it. Let me know your thoughts!
In sadness
I am so sorry for the loss that the families and community of Newtown, Connecticut has experienced.
I cannot imagine their pain.
I had a session with a small group of elementary schoolers this morning. I didn’t know what to expect with respect to whether or not they’d be feeling anything in regard to the violence that happened on Friday. They didn’t speak of it at all, nor did their paras mention it; we spent a good deal of time improvising about what they liked during this time of year. I am aware, however, that my clients throughout the rest of the week may need to address what happened.
If they do, I will try my best to be there for them.
Perhaps I’ll give up sleep
I was posed an interesting question today. “What do you do for self-care?” Well, I have a clinical supervisor and a therapist, and I also have the pleasure of seeing a music therapist for GIM sessions. All of those things amount to a lot of self-awareness. Day in and day out, though? I think it’s hard to say. Because I have the luxury of creating my own schedule, I can also figure in pockets of time that I can use to do whatever I need or want to do. The hardest question for me, though, is, what do I need, or want, to do? If not something directly related to productivity, then there has to be something indirectly related to productivity that I can manage in my between-time.
Currently, life revolves around traveling to see clients, seeing them, documenting the sessions, and then moving on to the next client. Where else is there time? Should I give up sleep? I could try. Oh, to have a scheduled recess like I remember in elementary school.
A thought on Thursday
I had another enlightening supervision session tonight. Thursdays are my really busy days, and I’m always a messy pool of goo when I finally make it to 6:45 and talk with my supervisor, but regardless, I took away a great thought:
“The therapist’s job is to say the unsayable.”
I’ve been noticing one of my clients offer resistance in regard to potentially uncomfortable emotions she seems to be experiencing. I say “potentially” and “seems to be” because alas, we haven’t gotten too far into some of these issues. (Which is not to say that we must; just to say that I’m aware of her blocking certain subjects.) Anyway, the above quote is valuable to me because I could actually speak the words “I’m noticing you don’t seem to want to talk about this anymore” (or anything else along those lines), as opposed to drifting over the silence or the displacement or however else that discomfort and unease is manifesting itself without acknowledgement.
That’s my very brief thought on this very big idea. Happy Thursday.
Christmas instrument wish-list
I could go on and on about what instruments I think I need, but I have to say that I am preoccupied by needing and even wanting a 3/4 dreadnought, also known as a “baby” Taylor or Martin. 
Teaching me the lyrics
My favorite part of the week thus far: When one of the elementary school kids I see in a special education class teaches me the lyrics to a song, and then goes on to add harmony before creating a song of his own about the Chinese New Year, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and Christmas. Man, that kid made my week. Or month, even.
I love what I do.
And it’s winter
Yesterday, we here in the Minneapolis and St. Paul areas experienced snowfall for about 24 hours, amounting in 15 inches or so in my neighborhood. This is a shot out the front door.
Luckily, even though I schedule myself rather tightly, I still lumbered my way through the streets and made it to nearly all of my sites. My big concern this winter is what to do when a storm like this hits in the middle of a weekday. I’ll have to pick and choose, and then probably re-schedule sites and clients for the weekends.
Snow. Lots of it.
Motivation
Working in private practice offers its set of challenges. One such challenge, for me, is finding consistent motivation to KEEP UP ON MY PAPERWORK. I’m actually pretty scheduled and somewhat determined, and definitely goal-oriented. But, my lists and post-its and planners and web-based calendars amass entries much faster than I can strike them (or recycle them, in the case of my post-its).
Today, I figured it out. Today, I felt productive. Today, I drank twice the amount of coffee as usual — and continued drinking it well into the dark of mid-afternoon (I hate these short days) — and today, I see a space in the lineup of paper product piles assigned to to-dos.
Today, there was coffee.