sutton058

Speech therapy is a rewarding job. I have to admit it, though: speech-language pathology can be super, super stressful at times. I remember a few years back, during a particularly difficult time in my career. I was working in an outpatient setting at the time. I have always been a lifelong learner, and I sometimes go a little crazy in my search for answers. I was reading everything I could find. I was taking ceu courses non-stop. If I couldn't attend in-person, I was watching online ceu videos non-stop at home. I want to give my students (or patients) my all. This is a wonderful thing, but I was putting work life so, so far ahead of my own needs that I wasn't sleeping. When I did, I started dreaming about work. I would wake up in a panic, remembering things I needed to do that day. Unfinished reports, visual schedules that needed to be created, materials that needed to be laminated and prepped. I was running on fumes. I had zero energy. No amount of coffee was fixing that.   I

The other day, I came back from an errand to find my toddler son outside with his babysitter. His clothes were soaked, and he wore the hugest grin on his sweet face. He was squealing with laugher.                                                            What had made him so happy? His red car, a watering can, and a bucket. You see, I'm a big fan of modeling language through play. We've played with these exact same toys before.  I've pushed him in his car multiple times. I've modeled words like "go", "stop", and "turn". We've gotten out Daddy's large blue bucket, and bounced his ball inside, while I modeled sentences such as, "Ball in. We bounced the round ball in the bucket." We've pretended to water the flowers (okay, the grass- I'm not much of a gardener) and talked about it as we did it. My son's creative babysitter, however, thought of a new use for all of these toys. When I came home, they had just finis