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