Weekend Update

This weekend has managed to turn out just perfect. Saturday was mostly putting life together; grocery shopping,laundry, housecleaning, and budgeting etc...that I try and shove into the first half of the day. Friday evening, the girls and I attended a fund raiser for a local adoption support group. It is nice to see families we have met throughout the girls adoption. I also got my ballot in the mail! I am so excited to vote this year; in addition to the presidential election there is a close governers race and an important 'death with dignity/assisted suicide' law that mirrors Oregons. It could have a pretty big impact on the lives of a lot of my patients - and after I have thought about the law, I think I am going to vote for it.
Today, we all went to the Snoqualmie Falls area and want on a hike on the Twin Falls Trail. It was a beautiful and cold sunny day with lots of gorgeous foliage. I can't say how much I enjoyed the time spent with my family today.
Almost the best part was the kids spending over an hour on the hike back up telling the worst possible knock-knock jokes imaginable. I need to print some off the internet to tell them - they haven't really discovered the meaning of a punch line yet. Their jokes usually go something like this "Knock Knock" "Whose there?" "Banana?" "Banana Who" "I ate the Banana". Followed by hysterical laughter. It is very cute.
After the hike, we went to Uwajimaya - a really cool, huge Japanese/Asian style supermarket in Seattle's Chinatown. Shkuri and I shared some sushi and everyone else shared some cheap noodles. Our dinner cost about 9.00$ - in contrast to the hot cocoa we had at the Salish Lodge in the morning, which cost us 22.00$. The kids are now winding down while playing a video game they bought at a store in Chinatown called Pink Godzilla - which is devoted to Japanese video games of all kinds.

Embracing the Dishwasher

We have a broken dishwasher in our front yard. It isn't on our lawn or anything, but it is still in our front yard, and it has been for almost a month, since it broke and Ar replaced it. Ar has definite plans to get rid of it, but hasn't quite gotten there yet.  The funny thing is, in our neighborhood, nobody really cares, and it doesn't look that out of place. I used to be a little chagrined about living in what could be (kindly) called a starter neighborhood. I used to really want to live in a nice, tasteful home - maybe not a McMansion, but something that had a little charm. 

Now I kind of love my neighborhood; I like that we know all of our neighbors, and that at there are immigrants from God knows where among them. I like that you can let your lawn go brown and have ten half rusted bikes on it, that kids just come over and start riding. I like that the people sitting out on their front lawn smoking in the rain wearing bedroom slippers wave to me when I get the mail. I like that there are kids playing at the park at ten o'clock at night on a school night.  I could go on and on about the joys of our neighborhood, but I would imagine you get the picture. 

  I have been in nice, manicured neighborhoods, and there is no way to get past the fact that ours is just a lot more laid back and livelier place to be.  It has taken me a bit of time to come to an acceptance of what demographic I fit in; sure, I may have ten years (and counting) of college under my belt, but I am certainly not living in Bohemian Bourgeois heaven. Thank God.

Life So Far

I am now about three weeks into my new schedule; the kids are back in school, I am still working my normal job, and I have added one to two days of nurse practitioner clinicals into the mix. Elias has started preschool two days a week and Ar is working a big job that requires him leaving the house at 5:00 in the morning. I am certainly not disapointed with how busy I am; come Friday night it is all I can do to crawl towards bed. Even thought it is very hectic around here; life is pretty awesome. I love my clinicals; it is so great to be doing what I have always wanted to do, I love seeing patients. My preceptor is very good; not only is she a wonderful practitioner, but she is a good teacher. She is making the transition from "I can pretty much handle anything that happens at my job" to "I know absolutely nothing, please don't make me cry" relatively easy. The kids are settled into their school/piano lesson/play routine. Som how it is all holding together. Now that I am unfettered from most homework, I have been able to throw myself back into reading. I had forgotten how much I love to read. I haven't made it to serious literature yet; after finishing the Twilight series, I am working my way through the fifteen Stephanie Plum mysteries by Janet Evanovich.

This last week was Ariel's birthday. Last night we had a smallparty with a handful of friends and family. Ar is very happy with his new backpacking hammock (to replace a tent) I got; I don't know if it will get very far from our backyard, but he is really happy with it. The weather is sunny and fall crispy, the kids are playing outside with friends, and Vegetable soup is on the stove for dinner.

The Frontier Nursing Service

I have now been back from Kentucky for four days - jet lag is waning and I am settling back into life. I spent my week there learning and perfecting my clinical skills as a Family Nurse Practitioner. Our group at Clinical Bound was especially great; there were only 9 of us and we spent a lot of time just getting to know each other. I hope that at least some of these friendships will be long term and our paths will converge again. The grind of school work has given me such tunnel vision that it took a week at Frontier to reset my
view. I came back with a much renewed sense of purpose in both my professional calling and my place in Frontier's wonderful history. I cut and pasted the story of the Frontier Nursing Service and Mary Breckenridge below; it tells a little bit about the history of her work.





Mary Breckinridge was the nation's foremost pioneer in the development of American midwifery and the provision of care to the nation's rural areas as founder of the Frontier Nursing Service.
Breckinridge, descendant of a distinguished family that included a U.S. vice president and a Congressman and diplomat, lost her first husband and two children to early death. She turned to nursing as an outlet for her energies, committed to "raise the status of childhood everywhere," as a memorial to her own lost children. She spent time as a public health nurse during World War I, and became convinced that the nurse-midwife concept could help children in rural America. After additional nursing studies and midwifery training, she went to rural Kentucky and began work in 1925. In 1928 her service was named the Frontier Nursing Service, and was for several years entirely underwritten by Breckinridge's personal funds. Designed around a central hospital and one physician with many nursing outposts designed to compensate for the absence of reliable roads or transportation, the service featured nurses on horseback able to reach even the most remote areas in all kinds of weather. Within five years, FNS had reached more than 1,000 rural families in an area exceeding 700 square miles and staff members of FNS formed the organization that became the American Association of Nurse-Midwives. Breckinridge masterminded the fundraising and publicity necessary to keep the service growing. The Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing, another part of FNS, trained hundreds of midwives. The FNS hospital in Hyden, Kentucky is now named the Mary Breckinridge Hospital, and it operates today, with a new Women's Health Care Center, still fulfilling the mission that Breckinridge created in the 1920s.

SNL Video

Greetings from Frontier

So I am far away from home. Thursday night I flew to Kentucky for the next step in getting my masters. There are nine of us Family Nurse Practitioner/Nurse Midwife students who will spend 8 days in Hyden, Ky before we start our clinicals. Although it is very, very hard to leave home, everything has gone well. It is still summertime here and warm. We had to pass a rather brutal physical assessment test this morning - all of us students bonded over the misery and tension we went through. From palpating the skull to testing for the vibratory sense of the big toe, I passed. The instructors are keeping up a rather brutal 12 hour a day class schedule. In some ways, it is a bit like summer camp. We all hang out and someone makes us food. We have to take turns in the shower. Although I don't remember having any booze at summer camp. It feels a little bit like being in different world to be in rural, Eastern Kentucky.
One of the best parts of having to travel so far is getting to indulge in a little recreational reading. I started the Vampire Teen Romance novel, Twilight, that is insanely popular. I have gone through it so quickly, someone had to drive me into town to Walmart to pick up the next two installments. I am a little too tired to form a cohesive thought and I need to write a paper, so I better stop stalling.

Tension face

I know it is an abuse of the blog format to use it to whine about ones day..but the kids start school tomorrow, I have an urgent care final and I fly cross country for 8 days of intense school training on Thursday. To say I have a lot to do would be a gross understatment. It has been a struggle all day to get things done and to try to do spend fun time with the kids. I was teetering towards overload when our dishwasher broke and prompted to drain a gallon of water all over our floor. In the same month that we emptied our savings to replace our roof and our washing machine broke. I just hope that my face tonight is not what my kid's remember while I am gone. ARRRGGGH. I hope I feel a lot better after downing a Mike's.


***Gross Parenting Comment Follows***
One question you never really want to know the answer "Why does it smell like poop in here??"