Workin' Woman

Now that I'm out of school and married, the 2 most common questions I'm asked these days are:

1. How's married life?
     Splendid, thank you.
2. How's your job?
     Kind of weird, but good.

I've decided to devote a little blog space to explain a little of my day-to-day life concerning question #2. For those of you who don't know, I'm a speech-language pathology intern. All that means is that every time I write my name at work I have to follow it with "M.S., CF-SLP" (ok, it means a little more than that, but whatever). I am employed by Lubbock's Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) program, so I work with kiddos under 3 and their families in northwest Lubbock County.

My kiddos have a variety of speech, language, and feeding issues that I "coach" families to address. Cleft palate/lips, hearing loss, autism, problems with language learning or articulation, feeding/swallowing problems... some of my kiddos are just a little behind in their speech and language, and others are severely impaired physically and/or mentally and will be in therapies or special ed the rest of their lives. I see kids at home, daycare, McDonald's, the library, Walmart- anywhere in their routine, but typically at home or daycare.

I have some really rockin' families and some really unstable ones. There's the family with the stay at home mama who hand made her family's Halloween costumes and will do any homework I give her with her kiddo, the mama with a drug history who's started to ignore us when we knock on her door... the intellectually impaired daddy who does everything he can and never forgets our appointments... the foster family that's been helping kids out for 20+ years...

I like my job. I end up getting to share a lot of life with people very different from me. I am daily amazed at the compassionate, caring hearts of some people and the neglect of others. Though sometimes I wish I did a little more traditional speech therapy and a little less driving (I drive around 500 miles every month for work), I feel very blessed. Remind me of that if I ever get whiny. I get a lot of great opportunities to show grace and compassion to people, and I think it's great preparation for relief work we want to do overseas (Jesus knew what He was doing when he landed me this job...).