An Update Long Time Coming
Clearly we have not done the greatest job keeping the blog updated over the last two months or so. Hopefully I'll be able to remedy part of that this evening. Since our last update, I've finished two more rotations of intern year, Vivek has gotten to 3 months, we made a 4500 mile road trip to North Carolina, Florida & Alabama, made another road trip to San Antonio and have spent lots of time in our garden.
On the home front the kiddos keep growing like weeds. Vivek had his 2 month checkup (we had it a month later than when we should have gotten it done because of all the traveling recently) and at 3 months he is now 12 lbs 2 oz! That means that in just three months he has doubled his birth weight...way to go Vivek. Although I must say that was a fairly easy task for him to do since he was so little when he was born. I think his weight now still puts him about the 10-20th percentile for weight...so still little like the rest of our kids. Vivek has gotten to be so expressive over the last month and loves to laugh at us and pretend he can talk with us. Karuna and Luke are taking really good care of Vivek and it has been wonderful to see how tender they are towards him although Karuna still thinks she is a part time mom and so we often need to give her extra instruction on not treating her little brother as her own baby. Tonight as I was putting the kids to bed I thought it was hilarious that Luke took out his baby doll that he plays with and decided he needed to feed it and so he pulled up his shirt and put the baby to his chest to make sure it could get some milk...clearly I need to have a talk with my older son!
Karuna and Luke have enjoyed lots of time with me around over the last couple of weeks when I had vacation. Melissa tells me that they went into withdrawal when I got back to my regular schedule about three weeks ago. We have spent lots of time digging together in the garden and we have gotten to harvest our first batch of strawberries, raspberries, snap peas, lettuce and green beans. It has been so fun to watch them in the garden where every new fruit or vegetable that comes up is a total novelty to them. "Oh look daddy...another stawbeuy" as Luke likes to say. Karuna continues to make progress with her homeschooling curriculum from Sonlight and she has been working hard on phonetics so that she can learn to read. She has also enjoyed spending lots of time outdoors playing with her many friends from our neighborhood.
Melissa unfortunately seems to have picked up a bad throat infection about a day ago and is not feeling well at all. Please keep her in your prayers because it is hard enough on her to function as a single parent when I'm at work but much worse when she doesn't feel well. Prior to that she has been holding down the home-front as I mucked my way around the emergency department last week as I started transitioning to my role as a second year EM resident.
In early April, I had a couple of days off in a row and so we decided to go to the annual Texas College of Emergency Physicians conference in San Antonio. San Antonio has always been one of our favorite cities to visit and so when we were given the excuse to go down there we couldn't find a way to turn down that option. I enjoyed the emergency medicine conference and learned a lot about the issues facing private practice physicians and our resident team from UT Southwestern won the resident Jeopardy competition. From the looks we were getting from one of our assistant program directors as we competed and did so poorly early on in the competition I think it was a good thing we won because I'm not sure if they would have lets us finish residency here if we had kept up our negative score on Jeopardy. After spending two days in San Antonio we spent one night with our dear friends Micki and Krystol Clark in New Braunfels. We met Micki and Krystol when Melissa and I started the alternative certification program to teach for DISD and we had kept in touch over the years and so it was wonderful to spend time with them and to see their children. Karuna and Luke loved playing with their son, Ian, and after we put all the kids to bed we all stayed up well past midnight talking. It is always refreshing to have friends that stimulate good conversation.
Five days after our trip to San Antonio, we embarked on another one of our crazy road trips, this time 4500 miles in 8 days. Vivek got a trial run on our San Antonio trip to see how he would do on a long car ride and seeing as how he passed that test with flying colors we felt more confident about doing this next big trip to Florida. We drove from Dallas to Snow Camp, NC to pick up Melissa's cousin Jory who was off for spring break and then drove to Jacksonville, FL to visit our friends Philip and Carling Laird. Philip and Carling were some of our best friends from the time we were at Mayo and so it was wonderful to see them again in Jacksonville where Philip is doing his prelim year in surgery at Mayo Jacksonville before moving to Emory this July to start his ophthalmology residency. The kids really enjoyed eating at Clark's Fish Camp because the restaurant was filled with hundreds of stuffed animals and so it felt like we were eating in the jungle...they also enjoyed the live alligators in the swamp outside the restaurant.
After our one night stop in Jacksonville we traveled on to Orlando where we spent three days with Melissa's sister, Jenni, and her husband Ryan. Ryan works for Disney World and so we got an insiders look into the world of Disney and all the things that go into making Disney World what it is. Ryan and Jenni live in Celebration, FL which is a master planned community developed by Disney to the tune of about $2.5 billion dollars since 1990. It was quite surreal to drive around this neighborhood where all the homes look like they were built in the 1940s and where everything seemed too perfect to be real. It was almost like being in the neighborhood created for the movie The Truman Show. We spent the first evening at one of the Disney Resorts watching the fireworks over Magic Kingdom and then spent the second day at Cape Canaveral at Kennedy Space Center and then swam in the frigid waters at Coco Beach. Luke loved the space shuttles and was convinced he was going to be an astronaut and Jory loved the simulated space shuttle launch. Probably the best part of the day was the kids getting to bury each other in the sand and then getting to spend the next two days trying to extract the sand out of their hair. Our final day in Orlando was spent at Disney World where we went to Hollywood Studios & Epcot. We were so thankful that we were able to get several free passes to Disney because of Ryan because we don't know people can afford a Disney vacation because of how expensive it is to get into one of their parks. The highlight of Hollywood Studios for the kids was the Lights, Motors, Action! Extreme Stunt Show where we got to watch them produce several stunt scenes. Melissa and I enjoyed Epcot the most - specifically the World Showcase where we were able to try foods from around the world. Karuna and Luke got a special treat at the end of their day when they got to have dinner with the Disney princesses. Luke was quite enamored with Cinderella and per report from Melissa, he blew flying kisses to Cinderella throughout their dinner meal...we think it was definitely his first crush. Karuna of course loved meeting all the princesses (including Belle, Ariel, Snow White & Jasmine) and getting to have a princess dinner.
After our time in Florida we drove back to North Carolina to drop Jory off and got to spend a few hours with Melissa's aunt Sheryl who had just returned from a trip to Kenya before we drove the next day to Huntsville, AL to visit some great friends from college, Heather and Russ Joffrion. It was really fun having Jory on the trip to entertain the our kids and his comical faces kept the kids from totally melting down on our 10 hour drive days. After a night in Alabama we finally drove back to Dallas so that I could start work the next day...a whirlwind trip to say the least but one that we were glad we did before Melissa's sister and brother in law move back from Florida to Nebraska later this month.
Since our return we spent a good solid week recovering from our vacation...isn't it funny that we need to recover from vacation? I finished up my last week in the OB-GYN urgent care center before returning to the emergency department last week to start my third month in the ER. It has been a steep learning curve to say the least now that I'm transitioning to my role as a second year resident in terms of taking on sicker patients and managing patients checked out by the previous shift to the oncoming team. The first two days were probably the hardest I've had in residency so far because of how overwhelmed I felt with regard to juggling so many things at once while a the same time feeling like I knew so little about managing very ill patients. Thankfully my attendings and other residents have been so supportive to help me through this steep learning curve and I've been blessed to have a wonderful wife in Melissa who has kept encouraging me and has continued to pray for me as I struggled with new responsibilities. In fact, after my second day back in the department I was literally in tears as I drove home because of how overwhelmed I felt. Thankfully some time in prayer and turning my burdens over to God helped fix most of my despair. Since those two horrible days to start of this month things have gotten steadily better and I've been feeling a lot more comfortable in this new role. Lets see what the rest of the month brings...
I think that brings us up to date in most of the happenings in our lives over the last six weeks or so. I've also posted with this some of the pictures we took in San Antonio. As always just click on the pictures below to view them individually or click the slide-show button below.
Slideshow:
May 13th, 2009 - 08:39
Thanks for the update! You guys have been busy!!