Julia's Literary Discovery, Part I

Julia loves the newest batch of library books at our house.  Mister Doodle: C is for City is one of her favorites.  Thankfully, I like that one a lot too, which is good since she has me read her the ones she likes over and over and over again.  

Tonight, she was really excited by a picture on the last page of the book.  She was fixated on it for a long time, pointing at it and screaming happily, saying, "Dada!  Dada!  Dada!"

What was the picture of, you might be wondering?

I'll let you be the judge of whether Julia was perceptive or not. ;-)

Birthday Blessings!

I had such a wonderful birthday, thanks to the people who love me and made it so special!  A beautiful start to what I'm sure will be a beautiful year!

On the evening of my birthday, before we headed to dinner!

Could Julia look more thrilled to be in this picture?! ;-)

I got up on my birthday and was about to hop into the shower when Aaron walked into the bathroom holding a steaming plate of scrambled eggs.  I was so confused.  I laughed, "Aaron, that was so sweet of you to make me breakfast!  Why didn't you just leave my plate in the kitchen, though?  I can't eat breakfast in the shower!"

He said, "I was trying to bring you breakfast in bed, but I'm just a little too late."

I assured him it was fine and to just put some foil over the plate and set it on the table until I was done getting ready.  I was amused all through my shower thinking about how absurd (and yucky!) it would have been if I'd chowed down in the bathroom.

When I arrived at my parents' house, my mom had made some delicious mini applesauce muffins and a hot chai tea for me to take to work.  I grabbed a quick lunch on the way to my parents' house to visit with my mom and Julia over my lunch hour.

The physician I'm working with this month, who is super, gave me some really great advice and some encouraging positive feedback before letting me off early for the afternoon.  I picked up Julia and enjoyed playing with her until Aaron got home from work.

I wanted to try going somewhere I'd never been before for dinner, and we decided on Sushi Train.  It was so fun!  There is a big circular bar in the middle of the restaurant, in the center of which is a cooking area where chefs are busy making sushi.  When they are done, they put a clear cover over the plate, put a little paper trifold sign on top with the name of the sushi and its ingredients, and put the plate on top of a train that moves around the bar.  Then, as the train goes past, you can just grab a plate of sushi off of it.

I think it's a really cool concept for a restaurant, especially for families with kids.  Julia was going nuts watching the train; she was waving her arms excitedly all through dinner.  That, of course, made it easier for Aaron and I to enjoy our own dinner, which we did!  We tried four different kinds of sushi, and all of them were delicious.  We'd looked at a menu briefly when we came in, and the prices for sushi seemed to range from $6-$10.  So, we were expecting our bill to be $30-$40.  When the prices were rung up and we got our bill, imagine our surprise when the total was $13.89!  We finally noticed the color coded plates and prices hung on the wall.  As it turns out, the four piece portions that go around the train range from $1.75 to $3.55 - the menu prices must have been for much larger portions.  Aaron said now that he knows how cheap it is, he's going to eat a lot more next time ;-)

The train was SUCH a scream for Julia!

TRAIN!!!!!

There was LOTS of arm waving going on as the train passed!

When we got home, we put Julia to bed and watched the latest episode of The Office, which was really funny.  Then Aaron gave me my birthday card.  When he handed it to me, I initially thought he must have not have had any nice paper handy and used scrap paper from work, since it was written on a blue piece of OSU progress note paper.  But, then I started reading it, and it was a SOAP note about me!  It was both hysterical and touching.  He is so creative!  

And then, he gave me my birthday present: a book called This Side of Doctoring: Reflections from Women in Medicine.  It is an anthology of over 100 women writing about the triumphs and challenges of balancing medicine, marriage, and motherhood.  It was such a thoughtful present, as Aaron knows I feel overwhelmed sometimes by all I'm juggling and wish I knew more people who understood what I'm going through.  I feel like I was given the gift of some wise older sisters in the field who truly understand and can serve as an inspiration!  My husband is the best :-)  I have much more to say about the theme of the book, but I'll save it for another post.

Aaron made a quick trip to the grocery store for a few things (diapers being the real necessity!).  When he returned home, we continued on our latest project of framing some photos for our house.  After that we watched an episode of Eureka and enjoyed some Magnum Double Caramel ice cream bars, before calling it a night.

Sunday, I got to celebrate with some family and friends with a kickball tournament!  We live right by an elementary school with some four square courts painted on the blacktop, so we spent a couple hours out in the warm October weather playing my old playground fav.  Then, we came back to our house for a meal Aaron and I had prepared earlier that morning (chicken tikka masala, naan, a salad, and Calypso pie) and had fun playing a game and visiting.  

The birthday fun continued with some clothes shopping at the mall with my mother-in-law this week!  Julia's gift to me also arrived this past week - two mugs with her photos on them!  What a sweet baby!

I also enjoyed many cards, gifts, phonecalls, emails, text messages, and facebook posts with warm wishes from friends and family.  I am so grateful for the gift of life and all the people who make it so rich and meaningful!  Praise God for this new year!

Julia at Ten Months!

Julia's ten-month birthday was on October 12!  She is getting so big! 

Highlights this past month include:

• Julia is speaking! I wrote about a possible first word in the last Julia update, and as it turns out, the connection is solid!  Whenever she sees a duck, in the bath or in a book, she excitedly says, "Du!"  Likewise now with dog ("Daw!"), baby (does really well saying this one), Dada, and banana ("nana").  My dad also sings, "E I E I O" to her a lot, and she can repeat that too!  She repeats "Weeeeeeeee!" when I'm spinning her on an office chair (one of her latest favorite things to do).  Now, if she could only get "Mama" down... ;-)
• Julia can stand unsupported now.  She can't stand too long before falling down, but she does pretty well with this.
• She has added several new foods to her diet, including black and pinto beans, tilapia, roast beef, pork, baby mum mums (rice cakes), corn, grapes, and shredded cheese.  She definitely prefers finger foods to pureed foods now.  She has eaten a lot of avocado and mixed veggies this month.  
• Unfortunately, we did discover that Julia is allergic to egg :-(  Her poor little face got covered in bright, red hives after eating it, but praise God she didn't have any serious ill effects, like trouble breathing.  We're hoping she outgrows it, because that'd be a tough allergy to have.  I am reminded of her egg allergy several times a day, as we've been administering a lot of flu shots at the clinic I'm at this month, and the doctor asks each person about egg allergies, since that is a contraindication to getting the shot, as the virus is grown in egg.  Sad day! 
• Julia loves books, which isn't new.  What is new is how she sits by herself now when she's not being read to, flipping through books on her own, making sounds.  She's usually pretty gentle with the books, and she can't get enough of them!  She spends more time looking at books than playing with her toys.  Bookworms that we are, we think it's pretty cute ;-)
• And speaking of toys, Julia has some rather unusual favorites.  I'll post about that sometime soon :-)
• She's gotten better at the concept of "in."  When she was younger, she only knew how to take things out (read: make messes), but now she can help put her blocks back in their bucket or her books back in their basket (read: clean up messes!).  If we keep working with her on this concept, we figure she can be our very own house elf!  (Just kidding ;-) )
• Julia is a climber.  She tries to climb up everything, dresser drawers, the dishwasher, the fireplace...  She climbs onto the shelves under the side tables in the living room and our bedroom.  She's such a monkey!
• Julia loves other small people.  She screams excitedly when she sees other babies and tries to touch them.  She frightens other babies with her enthusiasm sometimes.  Whoops.
• Julia loves the crucifix from Guatemala hanging in her bathroom.  She reaches up for it, and we take it down, telling her it's an image of Jesus and that Jesus loves her very much.  We'll say, "Give Jesus a kiss!" and she does.  So cute.
• Julia also loves images of family.  She loves looking at pictures of herself or the people she loves, both in picture frames and on computer slide shows.  My mom warns me that she's going to end up being vain!  Haha!

 I have lots more pictures from this past month to post sometime; I just need some time to sort through them.  Getting her three monthly photos was so hard this time around - we tried probably at least four times to get some, but she was never in the mood.  She's had a cold, though, so I don't blame her for not feeling like posing!

We love our Julia!

Looking Back on Twenty-Three

It's the eve of my twenty-fourth birthday, and I am feeling nostalgic about this past year of life.  In the past year, I...

• 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!  

What a year!  I think this year was the most jam-packed year of my life!  But, it was also the best by far.  I love my family so much. My marriage brings me so much joy.  Motherhood is so challenging, but so rewarding.  I'm really enjoying rotations.  I've been encouraged by all I have learned and all the ways I've grown this year.

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."

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