MS4 & 5K

 A few big things happened recently for our family.

First, Aaron and I both got promotions! Ha! We are now officially fourth year medical students!  You might be asking yourself, "What perks go with that promotion?"

• We get to write MS-IV after signing our names instead of MS-III! One less character to write means my work days are probably about to get about 4 seconds shorter.
• While we still have to take out sick amounts of loans to pay for tuition and living expenses, it is the last year of doing so!
• We get lots of electives to focus on our specialty areas (Pediatrics for me! Internal Medicine for Aaron!) which should be a lot of fun.
• This year is shorter because it ends in April before graduation in May!
• We're not on the lowest rung of ladder anymore, having the tiniest bit more of seniority - third years will be looking to us for guidance and residents and attending physicians will be allowing us to do more procedures, etc.
• This is our last year in school EVER. After 21 years in school, it will be awesome to finally be DONE, getting to do what we were trained to do and making a little of positive income for it!

Second, Aaron, Julia, and I all ran the Firecracker 5K on the fourth of July!

This was before the race, as you can tell from the normal hue of my skin and the dryness of my hair.

It was my first 5K ever, so I was really excited to run in it and really proud of the training I'd put in to be able to do it. Meeting this goal was even more meaningful for me because I had been training for the Scrub Run 5K a couple years ago, but stopped after getting up to 2 miles after a scary experience with exercise-induced anaphylaxis. Consistently taking allergy medicines and carrying my epipen with me just in case, I trained again this time, thankfully undeterred by any scary allergic reactions! I was abysmally out of shape prior to the start of training, and, while there are still some grannies out there who are quicker than me, I am much fitter than I've been in a long time, which makes me really happy. I run somewhere between the pace of a snail and a tortoise, so my goal was to run a 5K in less than 45 minutes... and I did it! 43:06. I was so excited and proud! I wanted to try to run the whole thing without stopping to walk, which I almost did. Toward the end, I started to feel funny after a long, hard uphill, so I did walk for about 2 minutes, but that actually really renewed me and allowed me to finish stronger, I think. I'm really grateful that the pace of third year allowed me to work on this goal of mine, and I hope to keep up with it. I had to wait for the huge blister on my right foot to heal after rubbing in a pretty massive one during the race, but I'm back at it again!

Near the finish line! See the blurriness of my shoe in the photo? Yeah, that's right... faster than the speed of light... er, maybe a lightning bug?

Aaron and Julia ran in the Stroller 5K! Cutest ever! They were the 2nd place finishers in that division, meeting Aaron's stroller goal of sub-25 minutes at 24:10. Julia had fun and looked adorable. I made her her very own Firecracker 5K race T-shirt by printing the logo onto T-shirt transfer paper and ironing it onto a white onesie. Styling. It was fun to have an excuse to be matchy-matchy. After the race, we were fed a complimentary breakfast of eggs with black beans & queso (minus the eggs for Julia) from Chimi's and Julia enjoyed dancing to the music from a live band. Then, back at home, plum tuckered out, we all napped for a long time, before celebrating the fourth with lunch with my family, and an early bedtime for an exhausted Julia.

Enjoying the breakfast. (Post-race, obviously, as you can tell by my tomato complexion).

Stroller Division Silver Medalists! (Had there been medals for that division, that is...)

Caught Julia mid-laugh. Love it!

"Golly gee, Mommy! You did it!"

Hooray!

And lately we've been studying for boards and vacationing with Aaron's family! More on that soon :-)

I wrote this post almost 2 weeks ago... but didn't have the photos downloaded until recently, so I waited. Hopefully the photos make it worth the wait, because there are some really pretty Julia ones in this post :-)