(Photo Credit: Kimona Paramour Photography)
The end of our trip to Tobago was amazing. It’s easy to be adventurous when your time is limited. I can be up for anything with only 72 hours left to go. Until we have our plane tickets in hand for our next trip, which we hope to make in about a year, we can’t know for sure when we’ll be back.
Every chance we have to do something special needs to be grabbed and squeezed for all it’s worth. We can recover when we get home.
Disclaimer – If you are grossed out by medical stuff, skip this post. I keep it pretty clean, but it still might make some people feel queasy.
It’s a word you hear a lot in nursing school. It’s the key to passing the nursing boards. It takes years of experience to really make those judgements with aplomb, and even then, you can walk in for a shift and things start getting thrown at you that make those decisions for you.
At work, we shake our heads when we come across a patient or family who ignored stroke symptoms, or difficulty walking, or a deteriorating mental state, for weeks before seeking medical care. By then symptoms that might have been relieved with prompt treatment are now a dire situation, and options are more limited.
In reality, we are making medical judgements about our families and ourselves all the time, although for most of us the consequences aren’t as grim. Does that cough merit a trip to the pediatrician? Is that knock on the head something serious? Do I really need to schedule a physical, or could I go another year? I feel fine!
(Photo Credit: Kimona Paramour Photography)
I only work once every two weeks. Since most people at my job work every other weekend, I see the same group almost every Friday night. When I work an extra shift, like I did this past weekend, I see people I sometimes haven’t seen in 6 months or more.
The nurse I was getting report from hadn’t seen me in at least that long. I’d been pregnant with number seven the last time we’d crossed paths.
She gave me a once over and commented that I’d lost a lot of weight. It didn’t sound like a compliment. Then, she asked if I’d had a boy or a girl.
(Photo Credit: Kimona Paramour Photography)
As parents, we like to eye roll and commiserate about our failings as parents.
We made an elaborate lunch to trick our toddler into eating vegetables. Not only won’t he eat it, he later finds and raids your Super Secret Stash of Snickers, leaving a trail chocolate smears and wrappers through the house.
You forget to check to see what your kid is wearing before they leave for something and find out too late they are wearing something wildly inappropriate for the occasion or the weather.
The kids learn something about life from your behavior that you didn’t intend to teach them and then share it in public at the worst time.
But nobody is dying. No one’s life is in danger.
We wear those kind of fails as badges of honor, a series of moments where we glorify in the funny, embarrassing times when our kids shine a light on our humanity.
It’s harder to talk about the times when we actually mess up.
There is a formula to life here for us. At the beginning of the trip there is enthusiasm. We might kvetch about the heat and the bug bites and rain on days we wanted to go to the beach, but we love it.
We have ideas about what we want to do, but there’s no rush. We have energy to go to the beach or take a drive every day.
