The Countdown is on...129 days

I had a very rough weekend at work. The roughest in a while. Saturdays are always the worst anyway. It is a 24 hour shift, and usually is busy and steady for the whole 24 hours. sometimes i am able to sleep for a couple of hours around midnight to 3 a.m., but often not. By the end of the shift i am so ready to be done. the other thing i hate is the fact that working a 24 hour saturday shift means that you are actually in the hospital every single day for 12 days straight. Don't even get me started on working 2 saturday's in a row. Having a day to not set foot in the hospital is really a very psychologic thing. I need it to feel normal. Anyway, now that I have the girls, a Saturday shift is truly like torture. I can't stand it. Fortunately I got to see them for a little while because nova has been getting progressively worse with her coughing/vomiting/breath holding, and cris ended up bringing her to the E.R. The last thing i want is to be the crazy Dr. Mom in the E.R. expecting the ER physician to be able to cure the common cold, but i was just a little worried since she has now been sick for about 10 days. basically i wanted to be sure it wasn't pneumonia. Which it is not. In order to make this determination, Nova had to sit in this terrible infant torture machine to position her for the x-ray. she cried and cried and cried. but no pneumonia. they did give us an albuterol inhaler with a spacer, but it is rather ridiculous to try to get a 9 month old child (particularly one that breath holds when she is supposed to be making deep inspirations) breathe through a spacer. I guess she probably needed a nebulizer. anyway, we think she is on the path to recovery. At least recovery from the Chuck E Cheese Ball Pit Virus. I am concerned, however, that the McDonald's Play Place Virus may hit her next, as that is where we ate dinner last week. Also, did you know little kids pee in the ball pit? I didn't. Nova has thoroughly sucked on and salivated on every single ball in the ball pit, and now i just wonder how many strange kids urinary germs are in her little mouth. Once my very wise mother told me about the urine in the ballpit thing, we couldn't help but also notice the overwhelming stench of urine in the tunnels at the McDonald's Playplace.

Anyway, back to the title of this post, the countdown is on. While i was enduring my terrible (on so many levels) call, i counted up the days until i graduate from residency, and came up with 129. Days. I had to look at that a couple of times for it to seem real. After starting this crazy process at a naive 18 years old, rushing through undergrad in 3 years, then struggling through 4 years of med school, and now nearly 4 years of residency, i am finally counting down in Days the time i have left until my training is done. Since I still owe the army 3 years of service, i don't get to (or have to, depending on how you look at it) find a job. I will just go wherever the Army thinks i should go, which is actually ok with me.

so enough about boring old work, and disgusting urine infested ballpits. Here are pictures of the two most adorable little sweeties in the world. I need to make an update on their development soon. They are both doing so great. I know i say it all the time, but I am the luckiest mama in the world. I tricked the girls into thinking they are playing in the baskets, but actually i was just confining them there for a few minutes while we got some stuff done.

The obligatory sleeping in the highchair picture

Did i post one of Nova in her little Hipppy Baby outfit yet? She's so stinkin' cute.