There’s a state in-between awake and asleep where my mind often wanders and thinks of my kids. Today I heard a voice when they came home from school. I was sleeping in bed, having come home from partial, eaten an early lunch, and put on the YouTube crackling fireplace sounds. I miss them there, feeling like they’re far away.

When I woke up I went downstairs to the boys room. They were in their beds reading. I remember this stage, it’s the same stage the others have gone through when they without you even noticing become more independent, not having to be watched every minute like every minute when they were young. Years and years go by like this.

I sat on the edge of one of the beds and the two of them told me about their books. Dad made a schedule, their daily routine of cold-weather activities. Piano. Chores. Today the three of them cleaned the garage. When I followed them I thought I counted 13 bikes and counted again. I took down the fall wreath and put up the next one.

This morning we went to church as a family. Dad did not have to preach anywhere. I was supposed to teach Sunday School but Josh said he would cover for me since I wanted to leave early to go home and continue working on my multicultural paper. I would’ve just stayed home altogether but he didn’t seem to be in favor of that. After church I took him down to the Sunday School room and showed him the book we use.

Then I came home. For the past day there had been a raccoon curled up and sleeping in one our old cat houses that stays on the deck. He was still there. Usually when a raccoon doesn’t run away immediately when it sees us it means there’s something wrong with it. With this one you could open the window and talk to it, knock on the glass, knock even louder, and it stayed where it was. He would occasionally look up.

Josh tried a little harder to get rid of it once they got home from lunch with Grandma at IHOP. He came out and put his face on the glass and you could see blood on his nose. I cried because I knew he was hurt. He ended up back in the woods. Josh then cleared off the cat houses so that no more raccoons come up and take shelter in them. They needed to go as they’ve been around for at least five or so years and were pretty grimy.

I spent most of the day working on this paper. I emailed my other professor and said I was not going to be able to get the power point done by tomorrow that is due in the other class. She said that was no problem. Tomorrow isn’t my scheduled day to present so I was hoping it wouldn’t be too big of a deal. I was going to work until 11 tonight but by about 8PM changed my mind. I’ll still read some more but with the writing I was done.

Josh and two of the kids went to the store later this evening to get ice cream to go with my birthday apple pie. I stopped what I was doing to come to the table for a little while. During the birthday song I started singing happy birthday to myself at first by accident. I blew out the candles and we ate pie and ice cream. I opened a few cards and thought they were nice. My parents called earlier in the evening so I talked them for a while.

(*Cereal: No clue what I mean, just a word that came to mind)

We picked up the kids around noontime today. Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus were out on the porch. Inside you could tell they had put out more Christmas decorations since we left. She doesn’t want to put out too many this year. With all the packing that is needing to be done and has already been done, she doesn’t want to unpack all the Christmas things only to have to turn around and pack them back up again.

It was good seeing her again since it’s been a little while. Toward the middle of November, she left to spend almost two weeks including Thanksgiving with my sister-in-law and her family. It looked like they had a good time from the pictures. My daughter was in need of a Christmas dance dress. While we were out to eat last night they sent of pictures of several dresses she’d tried on. I felt then like I had forgotten about her.

But I also know shopping is one of the things they do together. My daughter wasn’t totally sold on the dress she bought, so she would still like to check out the consignment store in Sherman. That is usually something she and I do together. We found her homecoming dress there for $10. Before we left, my mother-in-law said she could take my other son shopping for clothes sometime after school this week.

The kids are with Grandma tonight and part of tomorrow. Josh made plans to take me out for my birthday a few days early. It’s a little place in Springfield called the Inn at 835. It’s been a tradition since our wedding to come here. Usually we come on anniversaries but occasionally also come for an extra weekend overnight. We haven’t made it every year. From what we could remember the last time we were here was 2020.

For supper we went to a restaurant called Obed & Isaac’s. It’s something different from the typical chain like Red Robin or Chili’s. It was a nice time and the inn is beautiful and cozy as always.

Last year I didn’t talk about turning 40 or my birthday. I was busy, and I also tend to think it’s weird when people bring up their own birthdays. But life is a gift from God and it is something worth acknowledging. Turning 40 felt as though there was so much I was leaving behind, so much I didn’t know how I could go on and not have. But one of the gifts about marriages lasting is that you are able to in many different ways start over.

After dropping off the boys at school I returned to my practicum site to fit in a few more hours. I helped with a new patient screening and did a PSSA. The woman I met with was very interesting. She reminded me of Margot Robbie from Barbie. It is common for people when they enter the program to wonder if they’re really going to get anything out of it. There are so many things that they feel they need to unpack and address and they don’t see themselves as being able to have much of a chance to do that in groups.

The thing about groups that people often don’t realize is that much of the therapeutic benefit involved actually comes from the experience and process of simply being in the group. Getting out of the house and being around others-but not for too long, having the chance to hear about other people’s struggles and difficulties, giving feedback to peers as well as receiving it, all of these things are beneficial to the group members. Coming to a place where you are accepted in your frailties is often the most impactful part.

After practicum I went straight to my comfy clothes to spend the day and evening on the couch with my computer. Thankfully I have not been too tired this time following the busier Thanksgiving holiday. I do miss the days of being able to focus more on the Christmas things and turning my attention to decorations, thoughts, and gifts. You wait an entire year for Christmas so I do tend to try to savor the season and enjoy it. This most recent paper is about ageism and promoting health in older adult populations.

Last night in class there was somewhat of a miracle that happened. Our teacher came in and said that she was thinking about the recent stresses that people had been under with the news of the school closing and all of the rearranging that had resulted because of it. Because of that, she was wanting to do something compassionate for us in offering us the chance to forgo the final exam if we score an 85% or higher on our research paper.

We all agreed that that sounded good. Another student raised his hand and asked if it was asking too much to have an extension on the due date. She said she didn’t think it was asking too much, and in fact, she had something going on over the time the paper was originally due and wouldn’t be able to grade then anyway. So she gave us five more days to work on it and get it turned in. I immediately felt a burden lifted off of me. She had given us more time.

Not that I don’t still have two papers to write, and there are currently only two of us in that situation that I know of, but the fact that she had considered something she could do to make things easier for us, I felt overwhelmed with gratitude and love. My mind soon went to the 10% of the final exam. I raised my hand and asked how that 10% was going to be redistributed. She said we could just tack the 10% on and make the paper worth 40%.

I wasn’t about to press her for any more favors. I guess that would be fine. But as I thought about it more I began to feel burdened again at the thought of now having 40% of the grade be based on a paper that I had already decided I wasn’t going to try very hard on. My strategy had been to try harder on the other assignments instead and create enough bulk there to boost and hold up whatever the paper grade was. Later I raised my hand again.

Could we make the 10% an average of some sort? Like to incorporate our other assignments somehow? The idea of a final exam is to offer a cumulative representation of what we’ve learned throughout the class. By taking an average of what we’ve done that would give us a comparable replacement to a final exam. She smiled and said that was a good try but I was going to need a stronger argument. We could propose one as a class if we wanted to.

She said something about rationale and pedagogy. That sounded too hard to mess with. Really it was fine and I wasn’t going to worry about it. And then, this morning, one of the our classmates–he’s very smart–sent out an email to our class with an official proposal. My jaw dropped when I read it, at his brains, that he’d taken the time. He was checking with everybody first before he sent it. And this is what he thought I was trying to say. I laughed in awe.

~~~

Original Proposal (Per Syllabus): Final Exam – 10%

New Proposal: Comprehensive Writing Feedback (Aggregate of 5 Assignments) – 10%

Reflection 1 + Reflection 2 + Reflection 3 + Social Identity Awareness and Cultural Self Assessment + Ethnographic Observation = X

(X/5) * .1 = 10% of Overall Grade

Resolved: We, the Fall 2023 COUN 760: Multicultural Counseling Class, should substitute the final exam component of our grade (10% overall) for an aggregate on all the writing assignments (5 in total) for which we have received feedback from this semester.

Rationale: The aggregate of our five feedback writing assignments represents the conglomerate of our writing experience throughout the semester.  By averaging these 5 scores, we see a substantial increase in the observation and consideration of our overall examination, analysis, and synthesis of the information presented throughout the semester.  As articulated by Freire (2005), the search for knowledge is inclusive in the process of creation, and this experience showcases valuable skills.  These skills include, but are not limited to, discovering the complexity of problems, linking meaningful themes, and emphasizing historical-cultural context of material (Freire, 2005, p. 108).  These five assignments, averaged accordingly, accurately represent the education pedagogy, and would fulfill the proposed CACREP Objectives (F.1.e, F.2.a, F.2.b, F.2.c., F.2.f, F.2.g, F.2.h, F.5.d, and C.3.e) and LCU Objectives (1 and 3a.).

References:

Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 30th anniversary edition. Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.

~~~

I need six more direct service hours to meet my practicum requirement. I’ve completed the 100 total that we need, but had a slower start in accumulating the 40 needed direct ones. To be honest the first couple of weeks I forgot all about those. I spent my days observing and sitting in on the sessions. Today I led the focus group on Cognitive Distortions. It’s the third time I’ve done this one and feel pretty comfortable with it.

It’s hard to choose, but I think groups are my favorite, even more than individual. Granted, I haven’t had the chance to do much individual work at all, except for the Psycho Social Service Assessments I do with the new admissions. It’s where you’re gathering more information about the person and his or her story. With a straight face I write down abortions and abuses and can only say that I’m sorry. You wouldn’t believe.

Or maybe you would. It’s to the point now where I come back in and don’t remember their names. At least not when I sit back down at the computer to go over my dictation and make any final adjustments until it’s officially signed and becomes part of the patient’s medical record. I remember it only once I’ve scanned the names, and then I recognize the patients that I’ve interviewed, spoken to, crossed paths with for an hour.

It bothered me that I couldn’t solve all of their problems. Not that I actually thought I could do that, or that having all of their problems solved is the reason they’re there. But you know that almost every single person who comes through the program needs more than what 2-3 weeks of basic cognitive-behavioral therapy can give them. Most get referred to a therapist upon discharge where they can continue with individual work.

That makes me feel better and it does for them too. I had to find my purpose and the thing that I could say to them, something so that I wasn’t simply checking off my boxes and accumulating hours. It will never cease to amaze me the way that people trust blindly and not for a minute do I take that for granted. But I might sometimes, and have during times when I was itching to leave. They bring me back to my senses though every time.

We woke up to the first sight of snow for the season. It turns out when I went to bed early last night I actually did miss something. People in the morning were talking about the pizza they’d had I think sometime before midnight. My kids were all awake. My husband had been awake. Lots of the other grown-ups and it sounds like more kids had also been awake. It’s fine because I needed to sleep.

The families all left today. Josh left early with Ethan to get him back to Nebraska. I was worried that the slush would slow them down. But he seems on track to be home sometime between 12:30 and 1. He says he listens to podcasts to keep busy. Once everything was packed and cleaned up we came home and put away the refrigerated items. The rest of the stuff is still in the mudroom because none of us felt like doing anything more at that moment.

The boys and I were talking about homeschooling tonight. Every so often the subject comes up. I think some of it is just the Monday-back-to-school-after-a-holiday thing. But for a moment I was actually imagining us sitting around the dining room table again. Overall we had a wonderful time this past weekend with everyone. I am grateful for these family times of fellowship and memory making.

Casper followed me home when I left the CGC to find a 9×13 pan for the blueberry bars tomorrow. He’s been super excited to have extra people around. The nieces and nephews have taken turns holding him and giving him extra love and attention. My sister was telling me tonight about the critters she has in her house and how she has to order crickets and worms on a regular basis to keep them fed.

My thoughts are kind of all over the place. I love these family times together. It’s weird because my sisters and I can talk daily on texts but then at these things it’s like we’re not able to have that same kind of regular contact with each other. We’ve got responsibilities and there are so many others to also talk to. I wonder sometimes if we’d be friends in normal life if it weren’t for the fact that we were sisters.

This afternoon Ethan went to see Elijah for a few hours. Certain friends you rarely say no to. When he came back the kids were playing outside games with glowsticks. Several adults were talking at the firepit. Some of us were inside by the fireplace. Josh came in later and offered me a sip of his whiskey. I took a small one. I told the kids goodnight before heading to bed. They didn’t ask to stay up longer.

These are the times where I understand how Jesus could get lost. Often during these family gatherings I feel as though I barely see my kids and I truly don’t. I saw them a little bit today. We had a scavenger hunt where we broke up into four teams. The teams consisted of adults and kids of various ages. Miles came out for a little bit this morning and afternoon so he was on my team with Elianna.

This evening we had a talent show which is something we haven’t done before. People sang songs, told jokes, performed tricks with their dog, played instruments, showed their drawings, and did other things. My sister and two of her kids played a song I really liked called Build My Life. My brother and two sisters and I sang this goofy song that my brother wrote. We first sang it a couple of years ago and it was super funny.

It didn’t seem as funny this year but that’s okay. It can get to be a lot with so many people around but for the most part people manage their own space and recharging needs. I’m glad to be participating and moving around more this time but I am definitely feeling the increased activity. My sister brought a thankfulness tree this year. For my leaf I wrote that I was thankful for the gift of good parents.