Pages from the Philips

Sorry about the lack of updates over the last couple of weeks.  Even though trauma surgery is done and the schedule in emergency medicine for the last three weeks has been better it has still been a lot of hours away from home.  Melissa and the kids returned safely from their trip to Nebraska along with a new kitten they acquired from the county fair while they were visiting family in Nebraska.  Our new kitten is about 7 weeks old and right now we are deciding on a name for her between Cuddles and Roses…I think Karuna gets the final word on this since she and the kitten are glued together for most of the day.  Yesterday we also added a new beta fish to the family and so we now have three new pets in the home with the puppy, the kitten, and the fish!  Luke has been thrilled to have so many animals around and we get to hear his frequent screams of delight over something else one of our pets is doing throughout the day which definitely brings a smile to our faces. Continue Reading »

Only twelve more blocks to go in intern year! What a relief it has been to finish my month of trauma and to start back in the emergency room as of tomorrow. The last two weeks have been very difficult emotionally and have caused me to think again about the type of physician I want to be and to examine what our future life in medicine will look like. Continue Reading »

Christo is just about half way done with his first rotation of his intern year, trauma surgery.  It has been a long couple of weeks for our family as Christo has spent so much time at the hospital because of how busy the trauma service is at Parkland.  It has felt like more than a month has passed by because Christo is routinely putting in 80 hours or more a week while on this service. Continue Reading »

Good Saturday evening to all of you reading our blog.  We just finished a day with lots of friends and family as we got together to celebrate Karuna’s 4th birthday.  Karuna had a Princess themed birthday party and she got to enjoy some great chocolate/peanut butter cupcakes that Melissa had made for her.  By the time the party finally wound down tonight around 7 PM we had entertained almost 30 guests that had come to celebrate her birthday with her.   Continue Reading »

Just wanted to put up a brief update of our weekend before the week of orientation begins for Christo at Parkland. We had another busy weekend with lots of activities and plenty of home improvement including finishing painting the downstairs portion of our house. We will try to tackle the upstairs rooms this week. Daisy has been doing great with us so far. She has had lots of time this weekend to explore our backyard and our neighborhood on our walks. Continue Reading »

Just wanted to post some quick pictures up of the newest arrival to our family: Daisy Philip, a 4 month old Rottweiler mix who joined our family today.  We wanted a dog that would be good with the kids and be able to be a good guard dog and so far she has been great with the kids and hopefully we can train her to be a loyal dog that will help protect our family as well.  It also appears that she is already potty trained!  We got her from the Dallas Animal Shelter where she was found as a stray dog about a month ago.  You can view the slideshow of Daisy by clicking here or you can click on her individual pictures.  Enjoy the pictures of Daisy!

 

Sorry about the lack of regular updates on the blog recently. We are still working on projects around the house that we hope to have done before Christo starts his residency orientation on June 23rd. This past week was filled with lots of cutting, sanding, staining and assembling of our new built-in book shelves that have taken the place of the TV/Entertainment area in our living room. We thought this would be a better use of that space since we don’t own a TV and the books we have on the shelves often are a source of conversation with our guests. Continue Reading »

We are still working hard on getting projects done around the house before Christo starts his residency orientation on June 22nd. The big things we have done so far have been to put in new ceiling fans in all the rooms (did you know that a ceiling can make a room feel 10 degrees cooler and uses a fraction of the energy compared to running an AC unit?), picking out applicances for the home, putting in new programmable thermostats to make our AC unit run more efficiently, and putting in wood blinds throughout the house. Our big project that we started tackling today has been adding built-in bookshelves similar to the ones we had in Rochester because we still have hundreds of books and right now nowhere to put them. We hope this project will be finished by this weekend so that we can tackle our next project of painting the house followed by landscaping work for the third week. Continue Reading »

We just wanted to let everyone know that we are now in Dallas and working on getting settled in at our new home.  We have about three more weeks before Christo starts his orientation for residency and so we are filling them with unpacking, painting the house and working on the yard. 

We have been delighted to get to know our neighbors - as you walk your way around our culdasac there is a family from the Congo, a family from El Salvador, our family, an American man, a mixed family in which the husband is African American and the wife is Korean and then an African American family. There are lots of kids of various ages so Karuna and Luke are having fun making new friends also. 

We’ll post more once we get internet access at the house and when our home improvement projects get tamed a little bit more.

Also we just wanted to introduce you to the new site that our blog will be on.  We finally had to move our blog to a site that could be hosted on our own servers so that we wouldn’t have the problems of pictures being deleted like what happened several times with our old webserver.  There is also a new section on the blog called PIctures where you can view pictures in galleries.  We thought that would be an easier way to keep track of pictures and keep them organized.  Let us know if there is something else you think would be a good addition to the site and we’ll try to incorporate them.  Also notice the new links on the right sidebar…there is a website about some of the iniatives that are going on to improve our neighborhood.

Just wanted to give all of you a quick summary of our trip back to the US and our first few days back in America. We left Makunda last Wednesday to start our journey home back to the US. Before our departure, the staff at Makunda threw us a wonderful farewell potluck dinner and so we were able to visit with most of the campus families before we left. We were sad to leave so many new friends who have such a passion for serving Christ through medical missions work but we we were consoled with the thought that we will soon be able to return to India to labor with them to reach people with the Gospel. Continue Reading »