My new job

This last week I started a very part time job (i.e. only 5½ hours/week) working with autistic children. It's 2½ hours each on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, plus 15 minutes beforehand for inservice training. Basically what we do is spend half an hour with a child, working on communication, cognitive behavior, life skills, etc., and then that child moves on to another person and we get another child. So we work with five different children per night. It's actually really fun, but can be quite challenging since many of these children are partially or completely non-verbal and have very short attention spans. The age range is 3-14. On Tuesday I was primarily training with this lady named L, who was really nice. Our first child, "J", a boy of about 4-5 years, was screaming and crying since he'd just woken up from a nap, so we didn't get too far with him at all, but L explained the charting system to me and stuff during this time. During 2nd rotation, we had "A", about age 5, who has difficulty expressing himself and getting the words out that he wants to say. Saying "I want animals please" was a big challenge for him. He often leaves articles (a, the) out of sentences. He was fun to work with. Then we worked with a boy of about 11 or 12, "G". He was very distractable and goofy, but could read simple words from a book (although he was difficult to understand). L let me do the next child, "J", about 14, by myself. I had him point out things in a book, identify and place felt shapes in another book. He was somewhat verbal, but struggled with understanding a lot and certainly wasn't forming sentences much on his own. Then we had "S", a little girl of about 4. L left me with her for a bit, and I *tried* to get her to talk to me while we played Mr. Potato Head. She was supposed to be working on 3-4 word sentences. She threw a tantrum when I tried to get her to pick up Mr. Potato Head before we got out a puzzle to do. But then when L came back in she threw an even bigger tantrum when L tried to get her to sit at the table and we really couldn't accomplish much of anything with her. On Thursday night a whole different group of kids comes, so I got to meet five new children, each just as unique and with their own strengths and challenges like the Tuesday night kids. I really like what I'm doing, and it gives me a nice break from the rest of my life. Plus I get paid $14/hour, which is always a bonus.