Internships, Graduations and Birthdays...oh my!

This is thankfully the last week of my incredibly hectic summer schedule. For the past two months, I have been doing a 40 hour/week internship for my current master's and taking night classes for OT prereqs. Last week I finished up my internship at a center-based therapy place for kids. Even though it was a lot of work and I thought I hated it at the time, I really did enjoy it. I got to work with some amazing kids and make some differences. I helped run the classroom/preschool type portion of the program and a lot of the kids I worked with had sensory issues and were on the autistic spectrum. My favorite part of that internship was this one kid who totally opened up to me. He was probably a little over 2 years old and would come into the classroom crying and not wanting to do anything but play with little infant toys. However, by the end of this two month experience, I had this kid wanting to play chase with me and hide and seek and he was constantly laughing through the session instead of crying!!! When I left, my supervisor told me that she wished I was already through OT school so that I could stay and work for them! So, all in all, I am really excited about OT school and now know that I definitely wanna specialize in children who are on the spectrum and have sensory issues.

So, this past weekend I graduated from UTD and got my Master of Science in Human Development and Early Childhood Disorders. The ceremony was long, especially since 75% of the names they called during the graduation where ones I never could have pronounced, and the same went for a lot of the Doctorate candidates' dissertations! My whole family came out for the celebration....my parents, Chris, my brother/sister in law/nephew, grandparents and aunt/uncle/cousins, which meant a lot to me. Since I am continuing onto another Master's degree, I expected this graduation to kind of be anti-climatic. I was wrong though and I was really proud to walk across that stage when they announced that I had received a master's degree. Afterwards, we all went to lunch at Gloria's where we had good platanos, margaritas and flan!

We also celebrated Chris' birthday this weekend. We went out to a comedy club downtown which created some sore cheeks from laughing so much. His birthday was last night, so I treated him and Jonathan (who had come in town from Louisiana to celebrate their birthday) to some yummy PF Chang's for dinner with some good conversation and catching up with Jon.

Oh! And Chris, Paul, Melissa and I are planning on going to Maui for New Year's!!! We still need to finalize our plans, but let me know if you have any suggestions!!