Friday, October 26, 2007

Good Call

We had our therapy call with Katie last night. It was good, if interesting.

First, she made level 3, and is actually going up for level 4 next week. Plus she graduated Principles, so I guess (and this was news to me) that we don't have to wait 4 weeks from when she makes level 4 fora pass - the requirements are level 4 + EITHER 4 weeks or graduate principles. So we may have a pass pretty quickly - but I'm not jumping on that yet.

She was very excited and happy, but then we mentioned we might have to cut the call a little short (we were on our way to meet some people to go to the local comedy club to see Heywood Banks, who our band boosters are booking for a fundraiser in February), and she had a bit of a meltdown on the phone. Instant victim mode. She was so concerned about losing any of the call time - and spent half of it crying and upset, feeling like we didn't care about her.

However we were able to work through this, and help her to see he own victim mode and language, and the rest of the call was good. Yes, we had to cut it about 5 minutes short.
She has been writing a lot of poetry lately, which I did at her age as well. She read one, and I felt I did good because I did not go into critique mode, which is what I tend to do anymore with it (probably because I took Creative Writing in college one too many times :-) ). I did talk to her about being able to receive criticism and not to take it personally. I recognized in what she has been writing the pure raw emotion that is so typical of teenagers. She has a huge amount of talent, but it will take a lot of development before she truly gets good.

So the call ended well. In 6 weeks she and Diane are going to have the call with just the two of them - so that could be good.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Some progress

It looks like our call last week may have had some effect - when we taked with 'A' last night she said that Katie was doing much better this week, working much harder. Apparently even the directory of the facility commented on how she was actually working really hard. She seems to really be enjoying the basketball team, with tryouts at the beginning of the month. She got her vote up in group this week to level 3, and should have it by the staff today. So if she doesn't melt down again then she could actually make the team and play (at least home games). I just hope if she does that she is better than I was at basketball (I sucked back then, and still do now).


I'm not getting any hopes up, but any encouraging news is just that, encouraging. I guess right now I'm waiting for the next stumbling block that gets in her way - the key to if she is really beginning to change is not what she does when it is 'easy', but how she will handle the bad things that WILL happen.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

one small step

We had our call with B and Katie last night, a day early because I guess he is taking today off.
It started pretty normally - i.e. her talking about how she is doing all these things, but not showing any real progress. We started to question her a bit because she was working on some level 5 requirements - and when asked why she was doing that instead of working to get level 3 still, she said she had done all of them for 3 and 4.
So I asked if she had truly done them all, then why didn't she vote up already? If she had done them, then why wasn't she supported.
She started talking about being scared to vote up, and being afraid the responsibility of suceeding. As she tried to explain this, B called her on it, saying that the reasons she was giving weren't adding up. As we dove deeper into this, she actually started to get a little real, and into some territory that was a bit more difficult for her.
So while it didn't start out very well (in my opinion), the call ended up being pretty strong. We are still waiting to see results, but this was a positive step.

Friday, October 05, 2007

not much news

I had our call with 'A' last night (Diane couldn't be on it, she had to work). Fairly uneventful - things are pretty much the same right now. Katie is showing some slight progress, but nothing spectactular, and in fact nothing we haven't seen before, again and again. This seems to be her current pattern, work the program for a while until she hits a stumbling block, then completely crash and burn.
She did join the basketball team, and is working hard on that. We are not an athletic family at all, so this is a good departure, and the fact that she is working this is good news.
So we continue to wait.