- finished my first semester of the second year of medical school while pregnant, finals and all, despite Julia being due on the Tuesday of finals week!
- gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, my precious Julia Grace, via an emergency C-section, after a long labor. Biggest and best change in my life this year!
- celebrated my first Christmas as a new mother!
- had Julia baptized into the family of God!
- had my first gallbladder attack in the wee hours of the morning shortly before Julia was baptized. After an agonizing month of attacks and 4 procedures (1 laparoscopic cholecystectomy, 2 ERCPs, and 1 endoscopy), the gallbladder nightmare was over!
- bought a house and moved! Woo hoo!
- sponsored a friend through RCIA and welcomed her into the Catholic Church!
- finished my second year of medical school with a new baby! Praise God for the gift of the support of family and friends, especially my mother, for making that possible!
- studied for and took Step 1 of boards!
- auditioned for Jeopardy!
- witnessed some beautiful weddings, including my sister's, where I gained a new brother-in-law!
- started rotations! I'm on a community clinic rotation currently, and have finished a family medicine elective, pediatrics, and psychiatry.
- parented Julia for ten months now! I am also close to meeting my (difficult! for me, at least!) goal of breastfeeding her for her first year of life - only a couple months to go!
I was telling Aaron the other day that I never mind if people know my age. I guess at a certain point, a lot of people don't want other people to know how old they are, and I'm sure that age is probably quite a bit beyond twenty-four. However, it strikes me as a little odd. I feel like birthdays should evoke feelings of gratitude for life and adding years should add pride (in the good sense of the word), not shame or embarrassment! Every year I have lived has held unique experiences, ones I would never trade away to be able to say I am a few years younger. I'm grateful for each year I've been given, and I'm so glad to be who I am and to be exactly the age I am, the sum of all my experiences through the years. I think Sandra Cisneros expresses that sentiment well in one of my favorite of her short stories, "Eleven." I read it years ago and it has always stuck with me.
"What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today. And you don't feel eleven at all. You feel like you're still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.
Like some days you might say something stupid, and that's the part of you that's still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama's lap because you're scared, and that's the part of you that's five. And maybe one day when you're all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you're three, and that's okay. That's what I tell Mama when she's sad and needs to cry. Maybe she's feeling three.
Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That's how being eleven years old is."
Like some days you might say something stupid, and that's the part of you that's still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama's lap because you're scared, and that's the part of you that's five. And maybe one day when you're all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you're three, and that's okay. That's what I tell Mama when she's sad and needs to cry. Maybe she's feeling three.
Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That's how being eleven years old is."
Thank You, God, for the gift of life! Thank You that my parents chose to give me life and raised me to know You and love You! Thank You, God, for the blessings of the past year, especially my daughter! My life is in Your hands, and I am excited to see what You have in store for me in the coming year!
"On you I have depended since birth; from my mother’s womb you are my strength; my hope in you never wavers." - Psalm 71:6
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