Frump-O-Rama

I'm growing out of my maternity clothes. They just don't make some maternity tops long enough to cover my belly...so as I get closer to only fitting in muu muus, I felt cutting my hair might help. Not a huge dramatic change, but hopefully a little easier a couple inches shorter. Also, since my hair will all fall out after I have the baby, slightly less clean up.

Only 3 weeks to go, and we're really excited and can't wait. I'm not to the miserable point quite yet. I can coast these last weeks out, yet I wouldn't mind if he chose to come early either.

Did I mention only 9 more shifts of work?

Favorite Romantic Film of All Time Vote Results

I was surprised at the results of our poll for the Best Romantic Film of All Time. My favorite is Roman Holiday. There were only two other people that agreed!!!

I assume everyone that voted for Pride and Prejudice must have good taste, but haven't had the privilege to see the amazing film starring Gregory Peck, the perfect hero for any film, and Audrey Hepburn, the epitome of classy and elegant. To top it off, it takes place in ROME!! I could go on and on because Roman Holiday is one of my favorite films of all time.

Rhett didn't give it a chance because it's filmed in black and white. But what a shame if you share his same bias. So if you haven't seen it, I recommend it.

This is one of my favorite scenes. The Mouth of Truth.

COUNT DOWN!

This is a paper chain taped to my kitchen cupboard to countdown my 11 remaining shifts of work.

I think I'm anxious to be done for many reasons:
1. When I'm done I'll have our baby relatively soon
2. Working nights and these 12 hour shifts is kicking my trash as I get bigger and more and more tired
3. Work has been really crappy lately

To expound reason #3-work being crappy lately, it's mainly been due to weird assignments lately. Last week I got there and they told me I was to be the nurses aid on 4th floor. This assignment equals hell to me. There are a plethora of reasons I chose NOT to go to nursing school and all the major ones would be manifest being the pooper scooper in hell hall. Plus I'm 8 months pregnant and all the lifting required was not going to happen.
Thankfully my boss intervened and told them no way due to the pregnancy...so instead they assigned me to babysit a crazy guy. There are a few problems with this. First, in my place, they had a nurse take her ICU patients and just do my job on top of hers...which means no one does my job unless the phone rings. So poor patient care for anyone with a heart monitor on that night. Secondly, to babysit a crazy person is to make sure they don't get out of bed. I thought I proved myself worthless at this the week earlier when a nurse in the ICU asked me to watch her crazy patient.
That incident he was 60 and crazy and saw no one was in the room and went to break for it, but his IV's caught him and he went spiraling back and fell on his hands and knees. When he stood up I was yelling to sit down as I started walking into the room, at the time he began to loose his balance and eventually fall, I was probably 6' away. Rather than dive or even run to save him, I just watched him fall, then I did help him up. So they all saw I selfishly thought of myself before the patients with that incident, and I was surprised they wanted me to do this again.
So I went up and walked in the room and I knew this dude...we'll call him Bill...from his stay in the ICU and he was crazy then, but less mobile. I groaned knowing this would be a long 12 hours.
The first few hours weren't too bad. I just sat next to him and watched TV, he actually took a nap. I hoped he'd sleep all night and I could just catch up on all the network television I'd been missing for 2 years. But then the sun went down, and the crazy came up with Bill. Oh...to preface this, the night before he didn't have a babysitter and had managed to get out of bed and fell, smashing his eye on something and had a 2" suture above his eyebrow to outline his black eye. I had all four of the side rails up on his bed, and the most he could do would fling his leg over one rail, and I would just fling it back into the bed. But later the House Supervisor came and told me I had to keep the bottom two rails down because that was considered a restraint.
So down came the rails and out came Bill's legs. At one point I let him sit on the edge of the bed, but he started leaning forward, so I shoved him back and adjusted the bed into a pike position, so his knees were up. He was pretty mad throughout all of this, cursing at me and calling me names and telling me where to go and on and on. But the pike positions was awesome. It would take all his energy to sit up and lean on his elbow, he'd stare at me, run out of breath (major smoker) and collapse back into the bed. For 5 hours he did this. He'd get really mad, swear at me like a sailor, and even try to spit at me, but he was so weak, he ended up just spitting all over himself. He also refused to wear his gown, and after putting it on twice, I just left it off and covered him with a blanket. His nurse didn't mind and he eventually kicked it off when he was mad, so he lay there totally naked. I'd ask if he was cold and he would snort and say: "Course not." OK. I guess it made sense since he was getting a full work out trying to get out of bed.
I just sat back and watched TV until 3 am, as he did his monster crunches naked, and then I turned the TV off to hopefully help him get some sleep.
He was hallucinating all night too, pretending to smoke, asking me all sorts of questions, the best being:
Bill: "Are you going to go sleep with Dan tonight?" (Earlier hallucinations established Dan as his brother). Me: "Nope. I'm going home to sleep with my husband."
Bill: "That lump on your gut got a baby in it?" Me: "Yes. This gut is actually a baby."
Bill: "What you say we go outside for a smoke?" Me: "No way. It's freezing outside. Plus you can't even walk. Remember you cut your head open last night?"
Bill: "I didn't cut my head." Me: "Feel up on your eye. Those stitches weren't put in for no reason. You are too weak to get out of bed, you'll fall. So no smoking outside for you. Sorry." Bill: "You don't know anything you stupid *&$^#!!." I just rolled my eyes and turned the page of my magazine...Bill: "So you ready to go outside yet?"

After a while of sitting in the dark in silence, Bill began to scheme. I had been listening to him for 10 hours at this point. I was kind of staring into nothing when a row of stitches slowly raised above the top of the bed rail. A sliver of light from the hall shown over his snotty eye as it emerged under the bushy eyebrow, staring at me in the darkness. It reminded me of Edgar Allen Poe's short story, A Tell-Tale Heart where a crazy person murders an old man with a glass eye. At that point I felt Bill could die and I wouldn't mind, and he whispered: "You asleep?" I shot back:"Of course I'm not asleep I've got to sit here and make sure you don't get out of bed." Bill:"You look tired. You should go to sleep." Me: "Bill, I'm not going to sleep. Actually I only have 2 more hours and you'll have a new babysitter so you are the one that should get some sleep." More cursing and another collapse of exhaustion into his bed. I was never so glad to see the clock strike 6am than that morning when Bill and I could part ways.

His nurse thanked me as I left and said I'd been really therapeutic for him. The image of an old man, totally nude, spitting on himself, panting for breath, and cursing in anger flashed in my mind, and seemed the complete opposite of therapeutic. But then I was even more shocked the next night when I got to work (thankfully doing my real job) and the House Supervisor said Bill had asked if I could come back that night again since we got along so well before.
I guess when you're crazy you have a weird sense of getting along with someone.

Since my night with Bill I've had the paper chain counting down...now only 11 shifts left!

Sympathy for Obesity

Lately, I've been re-evaluating my opinion of grossly obese people.

This picture was taken last Sunday, I was 34 weeks along. I have a short torso, and it is obvious I'm carrying our son pretty high. My greatest discomfort with being pregnant at this stage is I'm so huge I CAN'T BREATHE. The positions where I can breathe comfortably are really limited, and I think: "This is how fat people feel and why they all sleep in recliners." Or I climb our single flight of stairs and end up breathing hard and consider: "Of course obese people can't exercise, you would suffocate jogging one lap."

So for all those Americans with BMI's sky high, I'll cut you some slack, because it's hard to have to live with limited respiration...but on the other hand, it seems miserable enough it would be motivation to put the doughnut down, or atleast only eat half.

FINISHED!

To maintain my licence as a radiographer I have to complete a bunch of continuing education credits. Usually they are pretty easy to accumulate if you are working in the field, but these 2 years unable to work in Radiology have kind of stressed me out to get these done. I had the goal to obtain all 24 before the baby comes, and today I finished the last one!!!


And on another positive note, only 5 more weeks working as the telemetry tech in the ICU. Although boring at times, I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about cardiac arrythmia, and this job has been beneficial to my overall medical knowledge. I've learned a lot just working in the ICU, and probably the most beneficial thing I've learned has been seeing med students in their clinicals. I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what to expect when Rhett's doing rotations these next two years and I'll know to some extent what he's experiencing, so I'll be able to sympathize when all he has to tell me is hospital experiences and all I have to share are the number of poopy diapers. I hope to have some knowledge in what he is going through...and I'll save some nasty diapers so he can know what I'm going through.
And as excited as I am to quit my job and just be a stay at home mom for a few months, knowing I will work PRN once we move is kind of nice. I will be able to have some experiences beyond child care and hopefully I will be still be able to carry on a conversation without always bringing up the baby...but it seems this is hard for most moms to do, so it's probably inevitable my identity will change from adult to mom and kid issues are all I can talk about.

Best Meal Rhett's Had in A Long Time

This week is Spring Break for Rhett, and there's not much to do in Kirksville with the cold weather, so he decided to take a night for homemade pasta. Rhett got a pasta maker for Christmas, and has loved it. This time he went gourmet and made

Tortellini filled with

Pumpkin and Sage.

FILLING:
2 lb pumpkin or butternut squash
6 T olive oil
1 small red onion, finely chopped
1/3 c. ricotta cheese
1 egg yolk, beaten
1/4 c. grated Parmesan
1 tsp nutmeg
2 T chopped fresh sage
Cut squash in large chunks and place in smal roasting pan, skin side down. Drizzle w/ 3 T of the olive oil, and lots of salt and pepper. Bake at 375 min or until completely soft. Scrape out of shells into mixing bowl. Using the remaining 3 T olive oil, cook onions until soft, add to squash and mash. Add remaining ingredients for filling.

Cut your pasta sheets into 2 or 3" squares. (Rhett makes his own pasta, but you could buy fresh lasagna sheets.) Brush w/ egg wash (1 egg & 2 tsp milk, beaten). Put a small tsp of filling on and seal seam of triangle, and bring edges together on top to make tortellini. Place pasta on baking paper and cover with damp teacloth.

Boil in salted water until al dente.




The sauce Rhett made had sweet onions, garlic, fresh roma tomatoes, salami, and I don't know what else he threw in there, but it was really good. I made focaccia bread and he made Orancatta, which is carbonated orange juice. For dessert, we wimped out and just bought Blue Bunny brand Gelato, which wasn't the real thing, but not too bad.

All in all it was another great pasta experiment, and we made a ton, so we have frozen tortellini in the freezer. We have a lot of fun cooking, but it was more intense this time...I think Rhett was giving me payback for making him watch No Reservations Saturday night--he hated that movie. So he kept insisting I refer to him as "Chef" and he'd make comments about having to find another sous chef after tonight, telling me to hurry, and overall teasing me the whole time. It was pretty funny and I think it did make me shape all the little pasta blobs faster than I would have otherwise.

Landlord Isn't Dead After All...

Our previous land lord that let the house we were renting fall into foreclosure is alive. In January the mortgage company claimed the house and we had 12 days to get out. The landlord had been planning to sell the house this summer after we moved out, and had invested in a brand new fridge, stove, and bathroom remodel since we lived there. So it seemed so strange she would let it all go, and stranger still she hadn't notified us, so we thought maybe she was deathly ill or dead.
Luckily when we found out, we were able to stop the check for our January rent. But after that, we still had our $500 deposit she owed us. She didn't respond to our phone calls or emails in regard to the whole foreclosure mess, or our deposit.
So Rhett wrote a threat note to her, and yesterday we received a money order for our deposit. HOORAY! I guess a mean letter was all it took to get our money.