The photo above was taken on June 15, 2017 at 8:29 a.m.
On June 14, 2017, around 8 p.m., I was at the hospital doing a Mock Code.
We’re required to do it once a year. In addition to knowing how to do CPR, which is a separate training, the Mock Code teaches us how to work together as a team during a code in a hospital setting. Knowing how to work with others and the sequence of events for emergency situations is essential for hospital workers.
I enjoy much of my nursing continuing education, because it makes sense. So much of our educational career, we are doing things and learning things that feel pointless and disconnected from our real lives. Almost all the training and education I do for my nursing career at the hospital feels important and necessary.
I need to know how to use the equipment. I need to remember the skills we use regularly to treat our patient population. And like I mentioned, automation is the key to success in emergent situations.
The thing that was different about this Mock Code is that at the time, I was nine months pregnant. At nine months pregnant, there is no more glowing beauty. There is the continuous preparation for and anticipation of birth. You are mentally done with incubating. Even with your first kid, you have some sense of the powerful process that will bring that baby earthside. It’s all you can think about. That, and how enormous you are.
This is me at the end of the day, a hot mess, hanging on for dear life. Or, alternately, a sloth at the Bronx Zoo. Your choice.
For years now, I have wanted to stop using screens in the evening, at least some of the time. I’ve always been a little jealous of married friends who casually say, “Oh, we don’t really watch TV together.”
But it is our default, after we get the kids to bed. We flop on the sofa in the living room, after both of us have worked hard all day. Then, we turn on the TV and watch something together. We’ve struggled to choose something to watch, even more so lately. A lot of the stuff the Chaplain would normally pick is just too cerebral for me to try to follow after I’m brain dead (NOVA, for instance? Fascinating, but I’m just too burnt to follow it.) The things I would choose are too girly (PBS’s new version of Little Women, for instance. Ah-mazing. But probably not of interest to the Chaplain).
So we were stuck in this rut where we would watch something we both were kind of ok with, but neither of us loved it. And I would trudge up to bed afterward feeling like I had wasted an hour (or two).
That’s One and Two, under the kitchen sink.
When I last left you, we were on color #2ish (while the faux finish took several coats of different colors, I am counting it as one color). I finally got fed up with the baby poop color when I was pregnant with Three. That was October 2008. 
Remember the definition of insanity? I tried another shade of green. For a little while, it seemed like an improvement. We had sprung for granite countertops like the ones we remembered in that first apartment, and that made everything look nicer. When we did that, we bucked the double sink trend at that time and got a single big, deep sink that allows us to pile in a ton of dishes before they start to peek over the edge of it.
But the new green I’d chosen, which I believe was called Scotland Yard, had a high sheen and was next door to a red room, which is only a match made in heaven for one month out of the year.
I knew it wasn’t a keeper, and just a week or so before Three was born in spring of 2009, I painted again.
Last night, three of our kids had dress rehearsals for their upcoming dance recital. If you told me as a young person or even as a young mom that I would be a Dance Mom one day, I likely would have scoffed at you. Yet watching my kids perform last night in their costumes gave me an unaccountable sense of pride. There were many wins yesterday afternoon. Everyone who needed hair, makeup, and tights without holes got them. We managed, against all odds, to make it to the studio on time, everyone in their appropriate costumes.
The Chaplain met us there, and we tag-teamed the little kids. I took scads of pictures that turned out terrible, as I knew they would, due to the dark purple walls of the studio and the unforgiving fluorescent lights. I had used both my camera and my phone so hard that by the end of the practice performances, the batteries for both were limping along and close to death. I thought we were finished, and the Chaplain and I started loading the Littles into the car.
If you have kids, how often do you bathe them? It depends a lot on their age, right?
Middle age kids tend to be a little stinkier, but need reminding to bathe regularly and put on deodorant if they wear it. With a little nudge, it’s easy for them to take care of things themselves… with prompting to turn on the bathroom fan, and a knock to remind them not to spend 30 minutes in there.
Babies don’t get baths unless you bathe them, but they also get a lot of “in between” washing of faces, hands, and backsides, and sometimes the parts that are attached to those parts when the mess creeps up and around. With them, bath time is almost 100% hands-on for the grown up.
Toddlers, preschoolers, and lower elementary kids are the ones who are most likely to have actual dirt on them, and they need varying levels of supervision in the tub, and help getting clean. We’re supervising a toddler to make sure they don’t drown, but the primary reason you’re keeping a close eye on the 4-6-year-old crowd is to make sure they don’t flood your bathroom and cause your tub to fall through the floor.
