heart cookies.

So I didn't win any romance awards on Valentine's Day. I didn't even stay home. I got together with some friends to paint Valentine's cookies. It was really very therapeutic, and I was super impressed with how brilliant the colors were! Big shout out to Joce and Cammie for making the cookie dough, rolling and cutting all the cookies, and setting up our painting supplies. The cookies were really yummy. Next we want to try painting bread. Oh, and we also shared a special heart pizza together, aw. (In my defense, B was prepping for his crazy comprehensive oral exam coming up later that week, so I wasn't the worst wife ever, right?)

a sample of the cookies we created

dinner out

Tonight we went out for dinner to celebrate Valentine's Day. We went to our favorite Thai restaurant here, which (usually) has a very nice atmosphere. It was still nice tonight, but a few things were odd. Like when no one seated us and finally someone randomly gestured to the tables along the wall...

Our waiter brought us place settings and water and left us with our menus. A while later, he came back and said (first words he spoke to us all night), "Wuuuuz up?!"

We both just looked at him. For a long time. Personally, I was waiting for him to give a more proper greeting and to ask if we were ready to order. I was not going to dignify "Wuuuuz up?!" with my order. When I finally decided we had created an sufficiently awkward silence, I asked, "Does that mean you're ready to take our order?"

the julie project.

Fascinating. Heartbreaking. At times incredibly difficult to read and to look at (especially at the end, for me). But I really believe in the importance of people's stories being told.

The Julie Project




.

needed a drug-sniffing dog.

During Christmas break I bought some necessities at Victoria's Secret. All day driving around with that bag in the car was incredibly pleasant because of whatever scent they had sprayed on the tissue paper. Mmm. The next day (after having sniffed the paper a lot) I decided I needed to know what it was. I called to the store and said I had kind of an odd question, but did they have any idea what scent they might have been using to spray the tissue paper the day before? Unfortunately, they use many different ones throughout a day, so they could not tell me.

Fast forward to last month when I decided to try to track down this scent in the store here. I took a good sniff of my scent-waning tissue paper right before I entered the store so it would be fresh in my nose. Obviously I have not shopped for scents at Victoria's Secret in many, many years. I remember them having like six flowery/fruity scents and five or so Dream Angels scents. They now have a whole room full of different scent collections, all with like six to eight scents within each collection. That room was a complete olfactory overload. I was overwhelmed. And yet I spent probably an hour smelling lotion after lotion, body mist after body mist trying to find it. I might have even tried to take my tissue paper out of my pocket as a scent refresher, but there was no smelling that over everything else. I thought I might have narrowed it down to two or three possibilities but ended up leaving the store empty-handed because I couldn't be sure.

Fast forward again (I hope you are using a DVD where you can skip by chapters and not a VHS where you have to pay attention to the fuzzy image on the screen and probably rewind and fast forward lots to get to the right place) to today when on a whim I went back to the store -- with only a vague memory of the scent -- to try again.

I can't believe I found it. Beauty Rush Wild Pear.

quote of the week {jan 30 - feb 5}

Will there always be a quote of the week? Doubtful. But it's such a catchy title.

This image was shown in class as a stimulus example for detecting covert facial recognition in a patient with prosopagnosia (as an aside, the covert recognition piece is fascinating...electrodermal skin conductance is greater when shown faces that they should recognize than when shown faces they shouldn’t recognize):
We were asked who each of these individuals are.
For the third, there was an overwhelming response of "Baba Wawa."
Professor (paraphrased): Mm, hm, Baba Wawa. Oh, I guess it's not very nice for a room full of SLPs to be saying that.

Hilarious.

clinic {spring 2011}

I don't know if I ever wrote about my clinic assignments last semester. I really appreciate the way CU sets up students' introduction to clinic: first years are paired with second years for the first semester. It eases a lot of anxiety (for me, at least) and is a very good learning opportunity. I had an elementary-aged literacy client, and a young adult stuttering client. Two very good experiences.

For your second semester, students (mostly) remain with their fall clients plus get several new ones. My client who stutters chose to discontinue therapy, so I lost that one, but still have the other. So, my assignments:

• As mentioned, an elementary-aged literacy client. I like this kiddo a lot. I am trying to change some of the session philosophy this semester because I felt that this client's focus was too much on games and prizes, and I want it to be on working hard to reach the goal of being able to discontinue therapy. This is difficult, but I believe it will be the most beneficial, and this client is reaching the age where it is even more important that reading/writing skills are solidified. Wish me luck!
• Project Learn. This is one of the infamous assignments at our clinic. It often causes a lot of grumbling among us graduate student clinicians. The set-up is that we go into three public school-based preschools in Denver one morning per week and work on the literacy/pre-literacy skills of vocabulary, phonemic or phonological awareness, and narrative. We are in teams of four and each have 3-4 kids assigned to us in each classroom. I am so not a fan of early mornings or commutes; there can be a lot of prep time and material making for three classrooms; it is super difficult to take data on individual kids when you have a group of them you are responsible for; and overall, these mornings are somewhat chaotic and very tiring. But the kiddos are pretty cute, and I think this will be a good experience. One interesting aspect of my assignment is that we were assigned one classroom of English Language Learners (who all speak Spanish). Yeah, I don't know any Spanish...unless I want to tell them my grandpa has a pick-up. These kids are super cute and the most behaved class of my three (sadly, they're probably terrified of this sudden change to English instruction for 40 minutes a week), but I feel terrible that they get excited to talk to me, and I have no idea what they are saying! Again, wish me luck! I am also accepting wishes for good travel weather and safe commutes.
• R-tic. I and my co-clinician have an elementary-aged client who has trouble producing the "r" and the "sh" sounds. I wasn't originally assigned this, but one of my good friends was assigned a client in this, and she was generous enough to let me join her as a co-clinician. I am really grateful for this opportunity because I have no prior experience treating articulation disorders, and I'm glad to start getting experience with it now since I would be likely to see this often in an elementary school setting.
  
• Stuttering Support Group. I'm really excited about this assignment. It's a support group for adults who stutter and a safe place to practice techniques. This is a half-semester assignment, and I don't start it until March, so I don't have much to say about it yet.
• LLD Dx. This is the one assignment I really, really wanted. Our team of five does diagnostics for language and learning disabilities for clients aged 8-ish to adult. Most often clients request this diagnostic because of trouble in school, problems reading, and concerns of dyslexia. We have not seen a client yet, so I am still really intimidated, but I think this will be an awesome learning experience. Diagnostics are intense -- 6 hours of testing divided between two days. I am also really excited about my team members.

There you have it. My clinic schedule right now is pretty great because I am done by Tuesday. Tuesday itself is a total bear with clinic straight through from 7am-6pm, and it is really exhausting, so I am glad I don't also have classes on Tuesdays. Haha, I don't even know yet how exhausting Tuesdays will really be since we haven't had a diagnostic client yet. Wow. I'll see if I am still standing at the end of the day next Tuesday (which will be tiring to the extreme since we have to make up a 3-hour class that evening...ug).