Wednesday, November 09, 2005

On My Docket

I loved Judging Amy . I watched it faithfully and especially loved the Child Protection work that “Maxine did.” I think that it is absolute torture that stupid CBS cancels the show but still has a website. Dorks.

I always thought it was cool the way that Amy and Maxine, though fictional characters, bended and broke the rules sometimes to help a kid. It was so refreshing to see them act like real people who really cared. And I’m sure that many viewers thought that the scenarios on the show were unrealistic, but with what I’ve seen they were dead on.

Anyway, I always thought it would be nice to be like Amy and have someone like Bruce, her assistant, give me my schedule for the day. You know, ask “What’s on my docket” and have someone else have to keep track of it all and just tell me what was next.

Instead I have my whole day before me and I have to do all the planning. I have to decide what’s most important to get to today and what can wait until another day.

For the sake of accountability, and since I have to write a list anyway, I thought I’d put it here. In case I’ve never explained what I do, I have two jobs. I work mostly as a volunteer for Adopt America and I work part time for a child-placing agency in our state doing homestudies, placing kids, and doing post-placement. Here’s what I SHOULD get done today, not necessarily in any order:

1)         Write the weekly letter to Mike;
2)         Type up case notes from my visit to one of my families yesterday;
3)         Call the courthouse to find out why they called (probably because I screwed up paperwork for a family getting ready to finalize);
4)         Set up a haircut appointment so that I don’t look as much like a dumpy housewife when I’m speaking in Washington next week;
5)         Set up an appointment to get the new van looked at because it sounds weird;
6)         Call and have the old van towed into the shop because it won’t start;
7)         Print and sign paperwork for another one of my families who want to finalize and get it in the mail;
8)         Do at least 7 loads of laundry;
9)         Follow up on several matching situations via email;
10)        Notify the social worker that we will sign paperwork so that if Mike runs again he can go to detention for 36 hours and learn his lesson;
11)         Clean off my desk and file a stack of paperwork;
12)        Do two very over-do expense reimbursements so that we can use some of that money for Christmas presents;

I think I’ll stop there. If I get all that done, I’ll notify y’all and write a new list. There’s a lot more, but I’ll just overwhelm myself. How long do you think it will take me to get all of that done (except the laundry)? I guess we’ll see. Now that it’s blogged, it’s almost set in stone...

3 comments:

QueenBee said...

i was devastated when I learned that Judging Amy had been canceled. Maxine was inspiring, and I like to believe that there are many real life Maxines out there. In fact, I think you are one of them!

processor said...

That's funny--whenever I watched the show with my kids, they'd get mad at me for talking back to the tv, saying things like, "That would NEVER happen!" Or, "Maxine would NEVER do that!" As a CPS social worker, I never saw the show as very realistic.

Claudia said...

I thought that the situations were real, but I agree that most of the responses were either impossible, impracticle, or breaking too many rules.

I liked the show becuase almost everything turned out great in the end, unlike CPS... and because their efforts seemed to pay off, unlike real life in the adoption world where things fall through every day.