Teens and Work Life

Anne has been in the workforce two mornings a week for just over six months now. She still loves her job at the consignment shop and hopes to stay there for years to come. The women are lovely, and they all have a great time working and laughing together. It is a perfect fit. Anne's current main job is organization of the store. She dresses the windows, dresses the mannequins, pulls clearance clothes from the racks, keeps all areas of the store organized and "pretty". She also tags clothes, but they quickly figured out that she is an organizing genius and patient with untangling messes. It is now her job to keep the hundreds and hundreds of empty hangers untangled, in order by style and size and ready for use. She also has the assignment of repairing American Girl Dolls that come in damaged. She has removed their heads and restrung their limbs, done lots of hair repair and generally cleans them up for sale. She is in her element and can't wait to get to work each day!

She has picked up a few tiny odd jobs here and there. Recently, she was asked to be a one day substitute counselor at a ballet camp for 3 and 4 year old kids. She agreed, even though she has very limited experience in child care and doesn't particularly enjoy working with very young children. As she left for work that morning, she told me that she hoped they were all potty-trained. I told her I would be more concerned with any of them being biters. The look of horror on her face was priceless. I almost laughed -- but I didn't. As it turned out, indeed one child was a biter. This child also threw many tantrums, spit, kicked and generally caused tons of disruption. The teacher of the class put Anne in charge of this particular child as a one-on-one. During one of the little girl's 10 minute tantrums, Anne was holding her and said to her, "how are we going to get you calmed down?" The little girl instantly stopped crying and licked Anne several times. Despite all that, Anne said she would be happy to go back and sub again. That is my brave girl!

Dean has been a camp counselor at two different camps this summer. He has struggled with co-worker relationships and much else that I spoke about in the previous blog post, but he has pushed on and completed what he set out to do. He enjoyed the second camp much more. It was new and filled with new games to teach. The second camp was all about monks during Medieval times. He liked all of the history teaching and large variety of activities. He did struggle with changing up his approach to counseling. At the first camp, the counselors were expected to use more drill sergeant approaches to encouraging kids. It was a much more pull yourself up by the boot straps kind of environment. The second camp required a much more gentle, loving and encouraging style of counseling. Dean made the adjustments necessary and ended up enjoying himself. He has expressed being exhausted and has a desire to just be at home for a while. Four weeks of working seven hour days was a hard transition into the workforce for him, but he did it! I am proud of him. He will do a bit of counseling in August, but can rest for now.

Blessings, Dawn