Work updates and haircut

Well I finally got what I've been waiting for...a permanent case at Hawaii Behavioral Health. Yay! She's a 12-year-old girl who is diagnosed with Autism, but the people that work with her say it's more likely that she has Rett syndrome. Her name is Darla and she is non-verbal, has seizures, is low-functioning, and very strong. I work with her from 7:30am to 2:30pm Monday through Friday. Today was my second day by myself with her, which went a lot better than yesterday. Yesterday she hit me, pinched me, scratched me, ran away from me, cried...it was really bad. But today she was sweet for the most part and more responsive to me, so that was good. I had help from the BISS on the case, who is pretty much the person in charge of deciding how to implement the goals in her Individualized Education Plan. Anyway, it will take some time for her (and I) to adjust, so the next few months will be difficult, especially because she's going to be transitioning into middle school next month. Plus I have to stay at the Spaghetti Factory for 20 hours a week to keep my insurance until I'm eligible through Hawaii Behavioral Health.

There's also news at Ben's job: he's training to be a relief night supervisor starting on Friday. The good part is that he'll be making a little bit more money and it'll look good to have managerial experience on his resume...the bad part is that he'll be working overnight shifts a couple nights a week. He's planning on sleeping while I'm at work during the day, and then hanging out with me when I get home in the afternoon. It's going to be hard on him to switch his sleep schedule all the time though. But he might not have to, since his shifts now are always 5pm to 1am. So we'll see how it works out.

We saved a little bit of money today by me cutting Ben's hair at home! We've been talking about it for a while, and I was going to go with him one time when he got a haircut, but I never got around to it. He's been needing a haircut for a while now, and Ben had bought some cheap clippers, but he wanted to do it on a day when he had time to go in and get it fixed if he needed to (which is understandable given that I've never cut anyone's hair before). So, today it was. I have to say though, I think I did a pretty darn good job considering I had no idea how to "blend." It's harder than it looks, with crappy clippers anyway. But haircutting, especially on guys, seems like it's not really an exact science, because you can't really tell if a few hairs are out of place. It was fun though. Here are a couple pictures of the work-in-progress: