Here is what 25 cents meant to Happy this week:
- It made him feel like he was part of a team!
- It made him feel important!
- Bragging rights, none of his other siblings have gotten raises at their jobs this year!
- It gave him a renewed purpose for his current working position!
- It made him feel like an adult!
- It made him smile, like an ear to ear smile!
- It caused him to do some math!
- It lead to great discussion about hard work and following through!
Now, I am not going to lie, I was starting to wonder if his job was going to ever bless him with an increase to his salary. We have had many job reviews in the past year and it seemed to me that they always found a way to skirt the issue of increasing his pay. For a person with special needs it is hard to take an evaluation or several evaluations worth of feed back, process it, and then work on those goals while still doing your job as well as you can. Something inevitably suffers and you end up letting an area that you do well already, slip into an area that you get dinged on at your next review.
I am grateful that Happy works somewhere that they are getting more comfortable with either the Prince or I attending meetings for discipline issue or for evaluations and reviews. While this is not the best practice, having your mommy and daddy at work with you, it does help us help them, by reinforcing the areas of weakness and encouraging him daily at drop off on how to stay on track and not loose focus throughout the shift.
It doesn't aways work the way we think it should, as sometimes the distractions are just too great for him to overcome, but it seems that the longer he is employed at this location, the more they are starting to see his uniquenesses and understand the limitations of what can be asked and what is understood by Happy when they are talking to him.
All this to say, Happy got his 180 day evaluation and review this past week and at the end of the overall assessment, received a high enough score to finally get a raise!!! I had the privilege of watching his face as he processed the news! High fives with his manager and a smile that would not disappear from his face! Heck, the Prince and I have done a lot of work for this raise too... I was jumping for joy inside as well! While twenty five cents to you or I may not seem like a lot, to Happy it was as if he had won the lottery!! He could not wait to text the Prince from my phone on the way home and tell him the good news, and as soon as we got home he could not get the words out fast enough to tell the other dwarfs about his raise!
It was nice as his mom, to reiterate how hard work, diligence and consistency pays off! His math skills still need a little fine tuning, but he is working on his plan to become the first millionaire grocery bagger in the world!!
Sometimes I am glad that I don't make this stuff up!
