Mom in the Mtns

Hi everyone!  As you know, it’s my last week at my current job since I’m moving next week!  Right now I work at a nonprofit that helps high school students find and keep jobs.  I’m a job coach (or an “Employment Training Specialist” as my business card states!) which means that I help students apply for jobs, learn how to interview, and then help support them when they find jobs or internships.  I also help them travel to and from work on public transportation and also help negotiate social situations for students who need assistance.  I have my own caseload but work with about 20 different students and each day varies.  I’ve been there for over two and a half years and it’s blowing my mind that I’ll be done working there on Friday.  I love my job (even though there have been some ups and downs lately) and decided I wanted to do one of those “A day in the life” posts that I see all the time on other blogs.  You guys have read about my after-work life, now it’s time to see what a typical day looks like before I start a whole new life up in Alaska!  So here is a recap of yesterday aka a typical day in the life of Kristen K!

6:30 – My alarm goes off and I hit snooze a bunch of times.  I hate waking up in the dark!  I finally turn off my alarm and check my email in bed before forcing myself to get up.

7:00 – Get ready for work.  Today I’m low maintenance because it’s the Phillies Home Opener and I’m rocking my Phillies shirt!

7:30 – Check my work email again, respond to emails, and write a summary report.  I have no pictures of anything that happened before I left the house because ain’t nobody got time for that.

8:00-8:30 – Drive to our suburban office.  Check email again.  Get a text from student #1, who has extreme anxiety issues.  She wants to confirm that I’ll be at the trolley stop by the office waiting for her, so I leave the office early to make sure she won’t get there before me!

8:40-12:30 – I meet student #1 at the trolley stop and she leads the way to the bus stop.  She has a long travel route!  On the bus we talk about the latest episodes of Teen Mom 2 which is our favorite subject.  I’m clearly a teenager in a 26 year old body.  At work I sit a few feet away from her as she inputs data into a library computer system.  Student #1 is awesome at her job but needs a job coach for situations that cause anxiety, such as making a mistake with her work.  Today she has an awesome shift!  We travel back to the trolley stop and she heads home…while I head to Wawa for some coffee!

The greatest place on earth!

12:30-1:00 – Answer emails, talk to coworkers about how my students have been doing recently.  I also quickly eat my lunch because I don’t actually get a lunch break at this job!

1:00-2:10 – I sign out the office car and drive up to student #2, who goes to school up in Glenside.  It’s such a long drive from the office but at least I get to drive by Arcadia University, which is where I got my Masters degree!

2:10-5:00 – I drive student #2 to his job at a hotel where cancer patients can stay for free while receiving treatment at a nearby hospital.  Student #2 does janitorial work and needs much more support than most of my students.  Today he vacuumed and dusted everything ahead of schedule and did not need too much assistance from me, which is honestly not typical but I’ll take it!  He’s a huge Phillies fan so I tried to get him home in time to catch most of the Home Opener.

Sorry for the creepy face covering, but I didn’t want to share his picture!  I did want to share our awesome Phillies shirts though!  He wears a Phillies shirt almost every day!

5:00-7:00 – Drive back to the office to drop off the office car.  I’m tired and sick of driving but figure that I can make it into the city in time to catch the Shack Track and Field group run that’s happening at 7:00 at Shake Shack, so I rush home to change and then drive over to University City.

7:00-9:00 – I get stuck in traffic and miss the start of the group run, so I decide to run around Philly on my own.  More details will be in tomorrow’s post, but let’s just say that I had an awesome run!  After getting in an hour of cardio I headed to Shake Shack anyways since I’d been craving one of their burgers all day!  I also grab a chocolate PB milkshake for the drive home.

View from the top of the Art Museum aka Rocky steps!

9:00-12:00 – I take a shower and catch up on Facebook and my favorite blogs.  I also wrote this lovely post that you’re reading now  🙂

12:00 – Bedtime!

So there you have it!  I don’t get much sleep and never seem to have a free moment (and I never realized how much time I actually spend driving around, oh man!) but I love being busy and wouldn’t have it any other way!  I’ll make sure to do another one of these posts when I’m living in Alaska so I can see how much of a difference it is living there!

Have you ever done one of these posts?  What’s your typical day like?