gratitude post

In an effort to make up for taking off in an existential huff for a week and a half, here are 10  5 (because bonus: I also got a job!) unqualified-ly excellent things that have happened in the interim since my last post:

1. my Dandy Walker kiddo! Okay, actually, not excellent; Dandy Walker is a fascinating, but distressing, medical condition involving hydrocephaly and, often (but not always!) developmental disability. However, as nursing student experiences go, it's definitely bi-winning to get assigned to that patient. My research into Dandy walker also turned me onto http://www.rarediseases.org  -- and, if you know me, you know there's no way I'd rather spend a free Friday night than doing shots and learning about rare diseases (much to the chagrin of my husband, who generally is able to redirect me to less blatantly disordered means of re-creating). 

2. You may remember my distress over my last Peds test. As it turns out, thanks to a whopping curve, I managed a 95% -- every point of which I will need, since I gather that the second test, which I am making up tomorrow, was much harder. (But as a thank-you to everyone who assured me I'd do fine on test #1, I'm just not going to indulge whatever meltdown this second test precipitates.)

3. Also: knitting! I still can't do it! But I can crochet, and crochet I do, aggressively and pointedly, in response to the myriad interpersonal conflicts I must navigate now that I 1. have a personality, rather than a DSM IV entry and 2. am less blissed-out on preggo hormones. (I don't know what kind of babies those cranky pregnant ladies were growing, but I felt amazing when I was pregnant, and not just because I found the body projects associated with growing a human to be much less odious and inane than those associated with Being Sexually Presentable, or whatever one would call that project that assumes I'm eager to spend large portions of disposable income disposing of any and all of the hair on my body, less my eyelashes.) 

Crocheting is like yoga, only better, because I actually have time to crochet and can combine it with other activities I do daily, including: talking to my husband and child about Things Other than Nursing School, making up songs about Congestive Heart Failure, watching every episode of Community the minute I can find and illegally download it, ignoring the palpable resentment of Subway Guy Who Had This Whole Seat to Himself! Gawd!

Also, if you crochet while your child is staging an Epic Tantrum (...yes, we're there now!), you are Planned-Ignoring him, which is a strategy; if slip down the street to BYC to collect yourself, you are neglecting him, which is illegal. 

4. My nurses, those writers of 40-page blueprints, bakers of wholesome cookies, interrupters of my own Epic Tantrums r/t cognitive dissonance, unanswered emails, and only-vaguely-English-speaking instructors (some of whom appear to speak no language other than English, unless you count American Stank Face (ASF?). It is absolutely the case that I am learning a great deal in nursing school, and I only wish that I could re-direct my student loan moneys to the individuals actually supplying the education my awesome father borrowed against his mortgage to co-sign on. 

5. Seriously, my nurses. By the grace of an at-least-occassionally smily and benevolent God, I got thrust into an amazing family the first time (see #4, above). It blows my mind at times, the way I've stumbled into another terrific group of people thirty years later.