Things that tickle my funnybone

Scenario 1:

I came home from clinical rotations the other day to find my five month old lying on her back on our bed with my husband leaning over her.

“What’s up, babe?” I asked as I breezed into the room.

“Watch this,” he whispered.

I looked over to see Raedyn combing carefully through his beard with both hands—very gently, with a look of intense concentration on her little face.

“She does this for like an hour every day,” Jon confessed. “I’m kind of afraid to shave—what if she doesn’t love me anymore?!”

Ah, babies. They learn so early on how to train their big humans…

Scenario 2:

A good number of my clinical rotations involve rounding in nursing homes to assess the health of some completely adorable and yet surprisingly feisty little grandmas and grandpas. Sometimes nursing homes are like having a front-row seat to a bunch of adult sized kindergarteners and their drama.

There is one duo in particular who crack me up on a regular basis. Resident A in this room has very severe dementia, and very little of what she says makes any sense. She asks a lot of questions, but doesn’t remember what she said 30 seconds ago anyway, so she’s easily redirected.

Resident B in this room is significantly more alert and oriented—she tells me frequently with smug satisfaction that she still “has all her marbles.” (Although she tells me this SO frequently that I’m beginning to wonder if some of those marbles might not be rolling away.)

Resident B is greatly annoyed by what she terms the “gibbering idiot” of a roommate that she is forced to put up with, but her way of handling it is what cracks me up.

You see, Resident A will frequently lie in her bed during naptime or at night and ask very loudly, “God? God, is that you?!”

At which point, Resident B will holler from behind the curtain that divides their room: “This is God! Shut up!”

And Resident A will look amazed that she has just been visited by the Divine Himself. Her little mouth drops open a few centimeters, and then she says, “Oh! Thank you, God!”

At which point Resident B chuckles like a naughty little school girl and goes back to watching her television in relative peace.

Oh. My. Goodness. I about died the first time I heard this interchange. But staff assure me that it occurs not infrequently…

I realized this morning that, while my 3 month old has more adorable outfits than she will probably ever wear before she grows into the next size (this happens approximately every 2 weeks), her mother has been wandering around the house in the same old ratty nursing bra and workout shorts for the past three days.

Which caused me to realize three things:

• I should get out more. It would force me to actually get dressed like a normal human.
• I should order new nursing bras.
• I really wish I looked better in onesies and footie pajamas. That would just be so fun.

My husband and I recently had a brutally honest discussion about allocation of housework within our home. It may or may not have been preceded by a bit of a melt-down by none other than yours truly…

We had gone out to eat together, sans baby—the first date we’d been on since the baby came almost three months ago. And as he watched me picking at my sushi, he asked, as well-intentioned men will,

“How are you doing, babe?”

I, of course, said that I was fine. And looked down at my sushi. And burst into tears.

At which point, of course, my poor husband began to realize that I was, in fact, not fine. Not at all. He was probably thinking, “Curses! I should know better than to ask that question!”

Anyway, all of this led to a conversation about who was doing what within our household, and since we reached the conclusion that he was (sometimes) putting his dishes in the dishwasher, and I was doing everything else, we decided to maybe divvy some things up a little differently.

Which is how it came about that my husband is now doing the laundry for our family. And he’s doing a fabulous job of it, I must say—he’s a good deal faster at folding things and putting them away than I am.

But the other day, I walked into our bedroom and saw my husband looking at me ruefully from the other side of a veritable Mount Everest of clean laundry.

“Babe,” he said, shaking his head somewhat mournfully, “I really liked it better when the laundry just magically got done.”

I probably got a smug little grin on my face as I started helping him fold clothes…because inwardly, I confess I was thinking, “Cool. I’m a magician. A magic laundry woman. I knew I had special powers of some kind…”

One of my favorite parts about mornings these days is watching my two month old wake up, and seeing her bi-secondly mood swings flit across her face.

It starts with much (as in, VERRYY much) squirming, grunting, and mini squeals, and then you can pretty much see her little internal dialogue start going:

“Ugggghhhh…I just really really do NOT like waking up. This is so stressful.” Her little face scrunches up like a tiny crinkle-nosed pink walrus pup.

Then one eye squints open, and my tiny human starts looking around with a dazed expression.

“Wait. Whoa whoa whoa. Hold the phone. There’s my mom! Oh my goodness, I just love her so much! I can’t believe she’s here again!”

A huge smile starts spreading slowly across her face--and is replaced half a second later as her eyebrows scrunch together in a concerned expression.

“Um, actually…this is really worrisome. I just realized I’m hungry.”

“Oh my gosh, I am SO hungry! Like, I’m not gonna be here anymore if I don’t eat pretty much right now!”

“Wait just a second. Is that the DOG? How does the dog DO that with her tail? That is just soooo interesting to me. Although I do wish that tail was closer."

She sighs heavily at this point.

“Ok, seeeerrriously hungry right now. Stay focused. Where’d mom go? Oh, right. She never moved.”

And then she leans over, butts me with her nose, and looks up into my face expectantly.

Um, yes. Yes, child, I do know what you want. You make these things abundantly clear.

Guys, I’ll be perfectly honest: on a scale of one to Martha Stewart for housekeeping prowess? I’m pretty close to a one most of the time. Some weeks zero. As in, zero vacuuming happening, zero dusting, very close to zero organizing, and only the bare minimum of dishes and laundry being done.

Particularly since this little chunk joined us, but I can't really use her for an excuse on this one, because, let's be real, I was a pretty not-so-great housekeeper even before she came. (Becoming the next Martha Stewart is on my list of things to do before I die, but so far, I'm a little behind on that goal).

Dustbunnies are the bane of my existence--like, seriously, WHERE do they come from? And how do they get together and make dustbunny babies SO ridiculously fast?!

But I kind of felt like I had reached a new all-time low when I walked into the kitchen this morning and found my dog walking around licking the floor.

Um, dog? Rude. Very rude.

Honestly, I really didn’t think the floor was THAT bad, but clearly homework has displaced housework for long enough. Mop time it is...

Parenting Practice

One of the things that continues to amaze me about tiny humans is how they're capable of producing adult-sized bodily function noises despite their miniature proportions. Sometimes my amazement spills over into my adult conversations with my poor spouse:

Jon, texting from work: "Hey babe, what are you up to?"

"I'm sitting here reading pathophysiology and listening to our daughter fart like a man in the next room."

"Sounds about right..."

She also burps like a drunken sailor and squeals like a full-grown piggy when she feels that her tiny personage is not receiving adequate amounts of parental attention.

And what's super crazy? I LOVE it!

We're baaaaack!

I'm resurrecting the old blog, at the request of friends. But it's been so ridiculously long since I've posted anything that I figured I should probably do a brief catch-up-to-where-we're-at-in-life post. 

Last time I posted, I was a college senior, studying nursing at Liberty University out in Lynchburg, Virginia. While I was there, I met this boy named Jonathan that I really liked:

(I think he liked me too).

We studied together, went on lots of fun dates and some crazy road trips (I got us lost a lot)...and finally, we could officially say we'd survived school, and were all gradamucated and edumacated, and all that there stuff. So fun. 

Then Jon and I had a heart-to-heart, and decided that we still did really like each other quite a bit, despite me getting us lost on all of those road trips, and he asked if I would consider NOT moving back to Wisconsin (gasp!)? I said well...I'd think about it. And then I moved to Arizona, to the middle of the desert, to live closer to this boy that I liked--I know, I know. A cheese-eating, brat loving Midwesterner plopped down in a Phoenix suburb. I'm still not over the shock myself, and it's been two years. 

I started working full time as a nurse, and in between workdays, sometimes we went on fun road trips. I drove and he navigated, and we got lost a lot less. 

That first summer in Phoenix drew to a close. And then that fall, the boy I liked flew me to California and asked me to marry him. While kneeling on a rock at Lover's Point that was apparently very hard and rock-like (he found this out because his girlfriend was so surprised by his question that it took her like five minutes to find her tongue and answer). 

But I said yes, I would love to marry this boy. So he gave me a ring to hold me to my word, and we started planning a wedding to make it official. 

11 months later, we flew to Wisconsin and got hitched, surrounded by happy cows and smiling cheese-eaters. (And several lactose-intolerant friends and family that we were equally pleased to see).

Then, because weddings and planning them and all that stuff is kind of stressful, we took a little honeymoon cruise to the Bahamas to celebrate being done with that chapter. And we had so much fun and ate way too much...and then we had to come home and get back to being adults with real jobs and real bills and all that stuff. But together. Which made it better. 

Well, we decided that being married was so much fun that we should also try being grad school students...and parents. So I started my doctorate, and he started his PhD...and on our one year wedding anniversary, we learned that in nine months, a little squeaky person would be making our lives a whole lot more interesting. Also less restful. But we didn't fully appreciate that fact until later. 

Raedyn Susannah

Fast-forward a few: we moved to a new house the beginning of January. Moving all of those boxes? That didn't start labor. I lifted heavy patients at work. That didn't start labor either. I walked the golf course behind our house for hours and hours and hours. Which also didn't start labor, in case you were wondering. Babies just come when they decide they want to, apparently, and on January 23, 2016, this little chunk finally joined us. All 10 lbs 12 ounces of her, which included a marvelous set of lungs that she's been exercising multiple times a day ever since. 

Which brings us to the present. My daughter, dubbed Squeaky as a result of her verbal contributions to the family airspace, is now eight weeks old. I still haven't flunked out of grad school. My husband hasn't starved to death. And both of us are still mostly sane. So I mean, for now, I'm calling that success. ;-D