Farewell VP!

Well, the time has come that I am officially done working at Vantage Point. Though I only "worked" (meaning I got paid) since April, I have been there since September 2007 as in intern first. I will completely miss this job as it was so laid back most of the time and I really enjoyed the people I worked with. Really, sometimes it felt like a second home as we basically hung out with the kids all day, playing games, watching movies, cooking dinner, baking treats, going to the gym, etc. (Of course we accomplished good things with them too...but really, it was quite the laid back environment.) Sometimes there was a great deal of stressful things, other times not. You just never know what you are going to get when you walk in the door at Vantage Point. On that note, here are my top ten memories (good or bad) that I will take with me from my time at VP.

10) Playing the board game "Ticket to Ride" all the time with the youth and my co-workers. If you have not discovered this game, YOU MUST. It took me a while to get into it, but now I am addicted. Too bad it costs $40 to buy or I would get it myself. However, I just discovered that you can play it online! What a problem....

9) On my first grave shift, which is 11pm-7am, (luckily I didn't have to do too many of those), I didn't know what to expect. Obviously I thought the kids would sleep and everything would be dandy, but no, I just happened to be there on a night when the police brought in 3 runaway girls from a long term drug rehab program. They were all from out of state and had escaped somehow. The police brought them to us, so I got to call their parents in California, Minnesota, and somewhere else in the middle of the night to report their activities. Then the director of their program came to pick them up and it was like an all out brawl. The girls screamed profanities over and over and finally the people literally just dragged them out and locked them in the van. I just stood there in shock as we have a no contact policy at our program. It made for an exciting night!

8) On my birthday, we had a youth there who was also celebrating his birthday. He was there for a while and so we got to know him well. At the beginning he was super hard to deal with and kind of made things difficult for us. As we got to know him though, he turned out to be a really nice kid with a hard background (usually the case with most kids there). Anyway, on our birthday, he made a professional looking cake...seriously it looked so awesome...and decorated it with flowers on top and wrote "Happy Birthday Kim". I was so impressed because he went out of his way to make the cake for me, even though it was his birthday too.

7) We have to go on an annual retreat each year and listen to boring speakers all day long talk about stuff apparently related to our job. This past summer, we spent the day up at a campground near Provo doing just that. However, our old supervisor, Mike, was determined to make it fun. While the people spoke, he proceeded to make up songs with everyone from Vantage Point's name used in them and sing them quietly, so we could all hear. I was having such a hard time paying attention because his songs were so ridiculous and funny. For example, my song was "the Kimcredible, edible egg." Our therapist Kathleen's song was "Kath-lean on me, when you're not strong..." Those are just some examples and he came up with one and proceeded to sing it for EVERYONE.

6) Recently, we had a girl start wheezing at the gym while we played sports. She sat outside to catch her breath for a while and didn't seem to be doing any better, so I took her back to Vantage Point (the gym is across the street). We called the nurse, who checked her out and said that her pulse was a little high, but she should be okay. I went to walk her to her bedroom and she collapsed into my arms. We grabbed a matress and put her in the hall where she proceeded to have a full on panic attack. She was writhing all over and wheezing so bad I thought she was going to die. I was freaking out...but luckily, shortly thereafter a police officer came to drop off another youth and let us know that he doubles as a paramedic. He bent down to talk to her and help her and stood right back up, took me aside, and told me the whole thing was an act. NICE. And I was about to call 911!

5) One Saturday for a service project, we took the youth to a nursing home in Spanish Fork. I was really concerned that they were going to have a hard time there, afterall, a lot of these kids are frequent fliers in the juvenile system, have been heavily involved with drugs and alcohol, etc. I just didn't know how they would respond to the elderly. I was so surprised though because they all did so awesome there! They jumped right in, took the people for walks, read them books, colored with them, and everyone said as we left how much they had enjoyed the experience. There is just something about serving others...

4) I was walking by the front door of our facility one day and saw a girl standing out there. She had not rung the doorbell, but looked really suspicious, so I answered the door and asked if I could help her. She said she needed to use a bathroom. I directed her across the street where there are public bathrooms, but she insisted that she needed to use the bathroom in our building. I told her no, then asked if she knew anyone there. She finally admitted that she did and said that her fiancee was sitting right there on the couch. I was so confused for a moment because we had a 12 year old boy and one other boy that I knew didn't have a fiancee. Then it clicked...she was the fiancee of one of our female clients! She was not supposed to be there, obviously, and tried to give me false names to come in to visit with her. Well, long story short, she stayed for a long time trying to talk our case manager into letting her see her girlfriend, but we just couldn't allow it. I was creeped out though because she had a van load of people with her and it seemed like she had been outside for who knows how long just peering in the windows watching her girlfriend. If I hadn't just seen her out there, who knows how long she would have camped out watching everyone. Yikes.

3) One day, I was helping my co-worker Amy cook dinner. We were making stir fry and she put the pan on the burner, turned it on, then dumped in a whole bunch of oil. The entire pan literally just burst into flames! Amy started yelling, grabbed the pan, put it on the floor, and then ran to the other side of the kitchen. The flames eventually died themselves, but it was so funny to watch. We teased Amy (still do) alot about the time she lit the kitchen on fire.

2) One night, the kids were in bed and Amy and I were there with a male staff. We were sitting in the office and kept smelling cigarette smoke coming through the vents. Well, we went on a huge man hunt looking in all the vents wondering where the smoke could possibly be coming from. Never did it occur to us to look in at the kids...haha. Well the next day, the same thing happened and the staff that I was there with that time marched right down the hall, opened the door to one of the girls' bedrooms and caught a girl smoking a cigarette right there on her bed! Obviously they are not allowed to have those things, but she had snuck them in in her bra. I felt so stupid that the three of us the day before were complete brickheads and searched the entire building, EXCEPT the rooms where the kids were. Nice, huh?

1) One night as our shift was winding down, we had an especially defiant kid who thought it was funny to break all the rules. I was getting so bugged by him because he kept sneaking out the windows and then ringing the front doorbell to be let back in. The windows are obviously alarmed, but he had learned to manipulate the alarm somehow so it didn't go off when he went out the window. Well, he did this over and over and over so we eventually decided not to let him back in (all the doors have to be opened by keys). We told him if he did it one more time, we would call the police. Of course, he did it again. By this point, I was kind of actually thinking it was funny (better to laugh then get too uptight, right?). So we called the police, who showed up as this kid was outside cleaning the grill (at least he was making good use of his time outside, huh?). As he saw them pull up, he must have gotten scared, because he took of running to the side of the building. I don't think he was going anywhere, but I was outside at this point too, and obviously the officer thought he was because he slammed his foot on the break in the middle of the parking lot, threw the car in park, jumped out and ran as fast as he could after the kid. The kid was just as alarmed as the rest of us watching this scene, so he stopped running and turned around looking bewildered as the cop came smashing into him and took him straight to the ground. hahaha...it was hilarious.

Well, this post is extremely long, but it has been a fun trip down memory lane for me. Here's hoping that the kids at Vantage Point will always behave for the staff left there!!!