Wow, totally forgot to keep writing here. What with graduation, getting employed, moving, and job training, it's been quite hectic, so here's a post to catch you all up!
Graduation:
Graduation went well. No snags or hiccups at all, so that was nice. Family came out to see both my wife and I, so it was a really nice time! I suppose the highlight was that I was the last person to cross the stage. It doesn't sound like much until you know that no one was supposed to clap until the end. So, being the last one, as soon as I got my diploma, the crowd erupted into applause. I know it wasn't specifically for me, but it still felt stinkin' AWESOME!
Oh, yeah, and I still don't have a diploma! That's a fun story. Turns out, one of my professors was missing a lot of work from me. It was all stuff I had done (correction, I admit missing one of the assignments), so I resubmitted it. But I was late, and the professor had gone out of the country for a couple weeks. After that, we worked it out and my grade got updated, but it was too late for the university to release my diploma (apparently they can only do that May and August), so now, I get to be an August grad! WOOHOO!!
But yeah, everything went well and all that jazz :)
Employment
So, my wife and I had stumbled across a job posting for "house-parents" at a boy's ranch in Arkansas. It looked neat, but they wanted "Psychology & Criminal Justice" majors. We figured we'd give it a shot anyway, so we sent in some papers (a letter of intent and our resumes) and just prayed for God to show His hand.
Well boy howdy He did. Literally NOTHING else we applied for went well. I never even got an interview from any of the other 50+ responses I sent, and my wife got only a handful, and those didn't really pan out at all. So, after a month or so, I called to follow up with the Boys Ranch, and wouldn't you know, they were really interested. They had us come out for a week on-site to see how we liked it.
A few weeks after that, we got a call saying "we'd like to hire you for relief house-parents" and we said "ok". Another week went by, and again we got a call saying, "actually, we will hire you as full house-parents", and we said "ok". So we moved out here to rural Northwest Arkansas, and it's been quite a blast so far.
I suppose this warrants a detailed description of our job, so, here it is:
We work a "Boy's Ranch". The basic premise of the Ranch is that boys with minor to moderate "adjustment issues" (things like truancy, bad grades, authority issues, behavior problems, etc.) come and life here a while, so that they can have receive:
-structured environment
-unilateral discipline
-positive reinforcement
-stable home environment
Now, that isn't to say that all the parents are evil cruel slobs. On the contrary, many of them are kind folks who simply don't know what else to try. But between working and maintaining a social life, it's hard to give a kid all of those things sometimes, especially kids with issues like ADHD or other social-skill type issues. The point is that my wife and I are paid to parent, basically. We don't have a job from 9-5. We're basically stay-at-home-parents, so it's our job to create those things, and we don't have to worry about putting food on the table or paying bills, because all of that is provided.
So our schedule looks (very VERY basically like this:
10 days on duty (total responsibility for the children)
4 days off duty (no responsibilities at all)
Now, there are 4 cottages, each with a set of houseparents, so they are staggered 2 and 2 for on/off duty. So when 1 and 3 are on duty, the relief parents are on duty in 2 and 4, and vice versa. There are two sets of relief houseparents, each responsible for 2 cottages. So a relief houseparent's schedule might look like this:
4 days on in cottage 1
--3 days off
4 days on in cottage 3
--3 days off
So yeah, that's the basic schedule. Also, I should mention that there a lots of great stories to tell here, but because of some of the DHS (Department of Human Services) and Licensing rules/laws, I can't give names or identifying information out, so expect a lot of goofy/generic names, or even just "the resident".
But yeah, that's our job. If you have questions, feel free to ask!
Hopefully I'll be better about keeping up the blog, especially now that things are getting interesting, what with us getting our first resident very soon. So yeah, check in regularly!!!
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