This week was more of a "regular week" for me--I worked Monday through Friday and only had specific things to do away from the house on two of the evening--Monday to take Jena to Provo and visit Ben and on Friday for the annual UDSF Board and Volunteer Dinner and Meeting. I wish that I could say that I got a lot of productive things done Tuesday through Thursday....I got some things done, but not as much as I think I should get done. Some days, working can be exhausting (imagine that!)
One difficult thing was that the clinical director at The Children's Center has taken another job as a clinical director at the YWCA women's shelter. That is good for her, but very difficult for us who are left behind. Not only has she been my clinical director, she also serves as my supervisor for my clinical hours and license. She, of course, will sign off on the hours that she had supervised for me, but the problem is that there is no one in the agency that can supervise me (and the other three who are in the same situation.) Everyone else either hasn't worked long enough with their own LCSW or they have degrees in other fields like mental health counselor or psychology. She is also the only other one in the clinical staff who actually had children which is sometimes nice to give some reality when we are talking about cases. Plus she is an amazing person and I will really miss her friendship and stability at TCC. It will be an interesting time ahead and it is hard to predict what will happen for our staff as we figure it out.
At our UDSF dinner meeting, we launched our new tag line: Love. Lift. Launch. This has been a three month process for us to discuss and narrow down the message we wanted to send with a tagline. I am not sure how other people feel, but I am falling in love with it more and more. I had to give a brief introduction of it at the meeting. I mentioned as we were crafting it, we had endless conversations about what we were trying to communicate. As we stared at these three words, another board member said, "I like it. It is what we do for our children with Down syndrome. We love them. We lift them as we teach them skills and help them progress. And we launch them as we allow them to be involved in the world, especially as adults." I responded, "That is interesting as I thought about what we do for the parents as a foundation. We love them when we each out after they have learned of the diagnosis. We lift them when they get discouraged with health problems, school issues, or community roadblocks. We launch the parents as we teach them to advocate for their child and those who are coming behind--at school, at church, in places of employment, and in the world." Then at the meeting last Friday, I learned about another point of view: Our children with Down syndrome--love, lift, and launch us--by their very natures to be better, stronger, kinder, and more gentle. Brian and Summer Cheney spoke to us and shared a bit about their journey with their son, Ammon. Ammon was born at 2 lbs and in addition to Down syndrome had CP, epilepsy, and had cancer twice in his young life. He passed away about 1 1/2 years ago after a battle with pneumonia at the age of 11. They spoke about how he did those things for them and for everyone around him.
And the reality is that we all can and often do those same things for the people in our families, our friends, and our communities. It most often is not in big and flashy ways, but in millions of small little ways that we love and care for each other. In the busyness of our lives, we sometimes forget that.....so we need to remember. Love. Lift. Launch.
That was a lot of thinking for the drive home from Salt Lake after the dinner meeting. Good thing I was thinking that night, because Saturday was almost too busy for any thinking at all.
I did manage to do a bit of housework before heading to Scott and Chantel's to watch Scarlett and James. I had made some homemade playdough which I had used at work this week so I brought it home to share with Scarlett. I had hid 8 items in it which she had to find, which she loved. I think she ended up playing with it for over an hour, hiding and re-hiding the little items. Then she started making pretend food with it.
Another fun thing we did was facetimed with Niki and Tosha. It was so cute to watch Scarlett talk to Niki. She told him that he "had a beautiful haircut" and after he shared a story about something she told him "That is so awesome."
Literally, between bites, James fell asleep. You can see his fork still in his hand.
From there, Jena and I changed clothes and headed down to Centerville to usher the matinee at CenterPointe Theatre (they are doing "Little Mermaid"). We then changed our clothes again and Gary and Mom Hall picked us up and we all headed down to the Hale Theatre to see "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." I actually don't think I have ever seen even the Disney version of this movie...except maybe bits and pieces of it. That is a serious commentary on social justice and related issues. I wasn't really prepared for that. However, the production was amazing and the music, costumes, sets, and everything else was stunning. The main actors' voices were amazing. This was our first show in the new 'theatre in the round' stage at the new Hale Theatre. It was a great one to start with as you could see some of the technical marvels of the new building.
We had actually thought we would be making one more quick change of clothes to make it to our Adult Meeting of Stake Conference. That was based on the idea that the play would be about 2 hours long. However it was about 6:40 before we got to our car, so we gave up that plan and headed to dinner at a nearby restaurant.
All in all, a great Saturday (if you don't worry about laundry, housework, shopping and the "to-do" list--which I didn't).
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