Day 1, again

Hey! Pediatricians are really nice! I think I am not going to be quite as anxious this rotation as in others. I'm going be to be in a newborn nursery with preemies for the next couple weeks, so it should be cool. Newborns are less grumpy than 2.5-year-olds, in my experience. But they also seem to be slightly less personally devoted to me, as far as I can tell from comparing the kid who lives with me to the three little babies I met today.

Back at it

I start my pediatrics rotation tomorrow, so I may disappear for a while. This past month I've been able to work on a lot of my own stuff, and see Dylan a lot, so that was a nice change. Nice, except Dylan recently figured out that whole terrible twos thing and is a little more contrary than usual. Whatever, at least she's sleeping. I'll leave you for now with a tucked-in Snuff and Dylan on a Train.

What passes for pants around here

When it has been winter for the entire span of your child's memory

"Him no wear pants?"

"No, those are shorts. It's a little different than not wearing pants."

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Every night Dylan gives each of us a kiss goodnight, then we each give her a kiss. Then she hops off our bed on her way to her room and goes "Thanks guys!"

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Our friends Kate and Dan (now married for several months thanks to Dylan's flower girl services) were in town visiting last weekend. Kate good naturedly spent an an entire hour-plus car ride on our way to a maple syrup farm chatting with Dylan in the backseat before we stuffed our faces with fistfuls of pancake and syrup.

They are planning to get chickens for their yard, but they want a few different breeds so they won't be able to get them until this summer. Which prompted Aaron to inquire as to whether this means they are counting their chickens before they hatch. Yes, yes they are. We can only hope the pre-chickens are not all in one basket.

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I have been telling Dylan for weeks that it's too cold to go bike riding (she means the big people bikes, with her attached). Today she asked, "Is no cold out?" Since it was 65 degrees and sunny I couldn't really argue. "Big bikes?" So off we were to the little bike shop down the street to get a bike pump, which is the next step before actually being able to use the bikes. The owner saw me and Snuffy waiting outside and said we could all come in, and if anyone who didn't like dogs came in they could just leave. He was really nice to us and gave Snuffy a treat and much admiration. Then the guy in the shop next door came in and told us he would have thought Snuffy was much older than he is (four next week!) because he was so calm. We are such suckers for Snuffmiration. And we got the pump and Dylan and I tooled around the neighborhood for a while and I didn't realize winter actually ended? Is this what it's like? So...light. And warm. Too bad I have to be sequestered away in the hospital again starting next week.

Hobo

When I picked Dylan up at daycare yesterday she was shuffling around the playground pushing a play shopping cart, wearing innumerable layers of clothing, with a hat pulled down over her eyes. I immediately took her home to take a bunch of pictures documenting my little bag lady, but we had to leave the cart at daycare and on the way home she lost the shuffle, so this is all I got. I am a sucker for all the colors so here are possibly more examples than you were looking for.

We won match day

The match is the thing at the end of med school where they put an envelope with your fate in the front of an auditorium and make you stare at it for an hour before you can find out where you're going. Last year our friends Kate and Annabelle got to go exactly where they wanted to and it was really exciting, except after that we had to do some strategizing so as to figure out how to ensnare friends graduating in future years so they would have to remain in Rochester with us. Handcuffs? Ankle bracelets? Brainwashing through subtle manipulative suggestions over the course of weeks and months? I don't know what did it in the end, but we (I assume it was us) managed to trick both Zach (Mochi's dad) and Allison (Maya's mom) and their affiliated families to sticking around for a few more years. Yay! Both our creatures will have their buddies to play with! Sol was a little too wily for our methods and is going to San Diego, so in retrospect we should have spent more time having Snuffy gaze knowingly at him.

In recovery

A lot of people have told me that when they finished their defense it felt anticlimactic--all that work, and suddenly they were done. Maybe I feel different because I've been working on a lot of other things in the past few months, but it definitely seemed like closure to me. So many people were there that I've worked with in so many capacities over the course of six years (I always think of the big group scenes in The Simpsons where all the characters from all the episodes pop up), it really had a similar feel to our wedding, except I guess it would be more of a professional wedding, and instead of marrying Aaron I would be marrying a powerpoint presentation and a 200+ page document. Romantic, no?

I may have thanked the academy at the start of my acknowledgments, but I did refrain from mentioning that it was my special day more than a couple times. Dylan seemed dazed much of the day. There were lots of relatives circling and I had on my party shoes and fancy clothes and she spent like two hours at daycare and people kept talking to her, so I think she was relieved to get to bed.

Then yesterday I went to a couple med school meetings and I was like, oh, right, I still have to do this part too.

something about...finishing something?

and also...alcohol

Yesterday's Theme: New I-promise-not-to-poop-in-my-pants pants

Expertise unrelated to all them years of schoolin'

The guy next to me in the supermarket asked me how to know which avocado to choose. I must radiate some kind of avocado knowledge (avocnowledge?). I kept my cool though, and nonchalantly showed him some examples that I would personally pick. I carefully refrained from congratulating him on his excellent sense of who to ask about avocados. Meanwhile Aaron and Dylan were careening around in one of those enormous shopping carts shaped like cars that drive worse than that U-haul we drove when we moved here. Wegmans is one of Dylan's favorite places, apparently aside from the sub counter. There's not really too much more to that story, at least that I know about, but Aaron was the one who actually lived it, so I'll defer to him for details.

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You may remember last summer when we had the children build the tent. We thought we would encourage them to continue to pull their weight, so we had them transport this tunnel throughout the first floor.


Heave ho, girls. Put your backs into it.

Then, as long as we were playing "hard labor camp," we had them stay in a tent. And invent their own culture and social hierarchy.



Don't worry! They were good so we freed them the next day.

Low fat

I have been wondering for a week why that batch of cookies came out so flat. Actually, I started wondering even as I made the batter why it wasn't quite right. As I made a new batch tonight I was apparently transported back in time just to watch myself fail to put any butter at all in. My subconscious was taking notes: do not let this happen again.

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The problem with preparing for a long talk is that it takes a long time every time you practice it (ahem, 2.5 hours on the first pass, knocking my brother out cold), although while I'm actually speaking time in fact speeds up. I don't usually mind giving presentations, but this is nerve wracking because I have to really plan everything I say carefully to fit it all in.

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Guess what? Dylan is not too big to play So Big. She also bakes pies.

Oh, right

"I had heard people say their kids toilet trained themselves, but I didn't really know what that meant. Really though we just told her what to do and she figured it out herself."

"Yeah. The only casualty was the sub counter at Wegmans."

No bear bear on the menu this year

We decided to reprise our Toronto trip from last March with my family as part of Aaron's never ending birthday celebration (now on week: 6). Last year the 3-hour drive took 5+ hours due to a blizzard, so this year we were very easily impressed. This is not a blizzard! We can see! Out the window! The drive took...3 hours! We still, however, managed to visit the rotating restaurant in the CN tower during a time of near-zero visibility, which led to exclaiming over seeing the tip of the flashing red light on top of a radio tower poking up through the clouds.

Luckily, we managed to recreate with eerie precision the candid shot that was captured last year.
Or, if you prefer, the fiery gates of hell is also a background option.

We also wrestled Dylan into a bathrobe again. I don't know why we thought that was a good idea since getting her to wear a scarf is a battle, but she caved in eventually. Ah, toddlers. They're so much smaller than me.

BleisenMusings

I am now on the e-mail list of my new med school class. I have gotten to know a few of my new classmates on rotations, but there are a lot of people whose names I don't know. The point is: My fellow students, I cannot differentiate between your e-mails and spam. Especially given your enthusiasm for exclamation points!

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Why did we not get a flake of snow during the Giant Blizzard that Paralyzed the Northeast and Also the Pretty Far Southeast? But we were all over the Freezing, Driving Winds and Bitter Cold? Just saying. It's cold. And windy.

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Why is Dylan so suspicious whenever I'm chewing anything? And how did she learn to smell chocolate on my breath? It's uncanny. Dried apricots, sweetie, that's what I'm eating.

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I am on a rotation now where I help with one of the courses for the second year students. Little do they know that as we sit in lecture I am typing up their exam questions. Having recently taken a rather horrendous exam myself I seem to be drawn towards developing evil questions. You would think I would be sympathetic, who knew?

Put to work, again

Good job this post!

Another side effect of daycare is that Dylan talks like a daycare teacher. It's not a bad thing in a small child--she's very positive. She always praises us after a good parking job, or putting on pants, or, more recently, after using the bathroom. I have to agree with her, it is pretty awesome to have someone offer you candy and stickers every time you use the bathroom. She's also learned to mug for pictures. Here she is with her arm around a duplo structure.


We're so proud.