Living the dream...or something...

Recently I've been realizing that I'm actually doing things that I've always wanted to do instead of just thinking about them or planning for some far-off day. I've always wanted to move outside of the mid-west and experience life from a different perspective. I've always wanted to do something that MEANT something instead of sitting inside of a classroom and working at meaningless jobs. And here I am. Living in Colorado, in a far bigger city than I've ever lived in before, working with the kids who need the most work. Strange how life works that way.

So, here's a breif update of some of the things that I've been doing lately. About a week after my first foray into the land of sushi, Marvin and I met a bunch of Paralympic athletes for sushi after this big media summit that Marvin had been working on. What a cool night that was. I didn't get much of a chance to talk to the athletes, but they have some amazing stories and some really great personalities. One of them was born in Russia and at a very early age had both of his legs amputated due to disformities caused by the Chernobyl incident. Another girl, when she was a baby, had a 100 lb. dumbbell dropped on her, severing her spinal cord. And these people have gone on to not only overcome their issues, but to become world-class atheletes. How cool.

I've met Marvin and a couple people from his office a couple times last week to go ice skating on their lunch break. There's a rink about 5 minutes from our apartment that we meet at. Marvin had never been skating before, but he's improving quite a bit from his first try. Only a couple falls and the last time we went, he was able to make it around the rink without holding on to the wall.

The job is still pretty crazy. Some days are excellent, and some days are terrible. I'm coming to realize that whether I'll have a good day or not depends completely on the staff that I'm working with. For example, all weekend I worked with Brandy, who is quickly becoming my partner in crime at Children's ARK. She and I have very similar working styles and very similar mentalities as far as life goes. So the weekend went swimmingly.

Yesterday though, I worked with the bane of Children's ARK. He doesn't know how to assert himself with the kids and he doesn't know how to get their resepct. So, yesterday was a terrible day. To put it bluntly, I got my ass kicked. I, personally, was involved in four restraints, which is almost unheard of. There were about eight in our cabin alone. And one kid that I dealt with twice yesterday is a puncher. He certainly knows how to land them. He got me a couple times in the head and arms (and maybe once in the throat, I can't remember) before we could control him. I felt so ridiculous because after that incident was over, I got a little verclempt and had to calm myself down a little bit. I'd been feeling kind of crummy all day and had been on edge because of the staff that I was working with, and that incident just sent me over the top for a little bit. Naturally, the kids, seeing one of their staff get a little emotional, freaked out, and I had to explain to them that I wasn't hurt and that I was ok, I had just had a rough day and needed some space to calm down a little bit. Needless to say I woke up this morning with a few pretty black and blue spots on my arms.

I'm so thankful that I get along with the people that I work with, because sometimes I think it's hard for people who don't work in a similar environment to understand what it's like to work with kids like this. For example, I was telling Marvin what happened yesterday with the puncher, and he had a hard time understanding how we can tolerate things like that day in and day out without losing our patience with the kids. Or, another example, I had a kid in a small child restraint out in the woods yesterday (which is basically like bear hugging the kid, holding his arms and sitting down until he calms down) and he was screaming at me to let him go and that he was going to kill me, etc etc, when a few girls riding horses came trotting by, and stared at me like I was some terrible child abuser or something. I mean, I understand how it must have looked to an outsider. A grown woman holding a little boy down while he was screaming and crying, etc.; but what that outsider wouldn't know is that if I had let him go, he was ready to grab a stick and start hitting another boy with it. What a challenge.