Vacation!

We took our first real vacation in a looonnnnggg time this month! It was so fun and refreshing.

We went to Missouri with Aaron's whole family. Aaron's parents, Stephen, and Jessica were in a two bedroom cabin, and Aaron, Julia, and I were just a two minute walk from them in our own one room cabin. It wasn't your Laura Ingalls-era one bedroom cabin, no sirree. It had a bedroom area with a king size bed (felt giant compared to our queen!) and crib for Julia, living area with a couch and huge flat screen TV (which we turned on exactly once to try to distract Julia while we were studying... haha), kitchen area with a table and chair set, and a big bathroom with a ginormous Jacuzzi tub and a walk-in shower with multiple shower heads in the wall and ceiling. The cabins were climate controlled and visited by housekeeping every day. And every evening, an employee stopped by to leave us fresh ginger cookies. Yes, it was the high life.

Our log cabin.

Delicious jacuzzi waterfall... haha!

Loving the jacuzzi tub!

So comfy. Well, Julia is anyway. I'm not sure about Ernie.

Aaron's family watched Julia for a while every day so he and I could get some studying done, which was great. Otherwise, we spent time doing a lot of the activities the lodge provided. We rented a pontoon boat one day and went tubing, we played mini golf, we checked out movies from the front desk to watch back at the cabin, we went swimming, we went walking on the gorgeous grounds. We also ate... a lot. There was a coffee shop for morning frappes and pastries and an ice cream shop for afternoon frozen treats. We had dinner one evening at the fancy old house on the grounds, and otherwise ate the big cabin. Aaron's mom had picked a great menu, so between meals and snacking, we were all eating high on the hog. In the evenings, we also played a couple crazy games of Catan, that involved a lot of boisterous trading and good-spirited arguing (probably 80% of the verbiage was Stephen and me... whoops).

Boating.

Do you think they might be related?

Mini-golf.

So beautiful.

Julia Crockett.

One of the funniest moments was when we took Julia to the stables for a pony ride. She'd just woken up from a nap and was still a bit out of it, but she was talking excitedly about the horse and saying, "Neigh!" until she saw the pony, Festus. Then, she became very, very shy. We encouraged her to pat the horse, which she did. Then, we made the mistake of trying to get her to sit on the saddle (while still keeping a firm hold of her). She flipped out. She resisted strongly and started crying, hard. We told her that Festus was a very nice horse, that we weren't going to let go of her, etc. but she would have none of it. She was terrified. The young man who was going to lead the pony around kept telling her, "It's okay, sis." We tried to get her to recall her former excitement about the pony and encouraged her to pat him again, which she did very gingerly. We asked her, "You love Festus, don't you, Julia?" Through her tears, she sobbed, "I love you, Festus." Her tear stained face belied her words, I think! Needless to say, the pony ride didn't happen!*

:'-( "I love you, Festus!"

We all had a lot of fun and really enjoyed getting to spend time together.

I already miss the Jacuzzi tub ;-)

*In other funny news, I have told the Festus story a few times in front of Julia. The other morning at breakfast, out of nowhere, Julia started saying, "I love you, Festus!" in a sad voice, imitating me imitating her, and she has done so several times since. Hilarious.

Nineteen months!

Julia has had to relearn her age because she is now 19 months!

• Julia is super expressive. She laughs a lot, and even fake laughs and fake cries. If I fake cry back to her, she'll say to me, "It's okay, mommy," and hug and pat me. So sweet.
• Julia is a very opinionated young lady. When she wants us to go somewhere with her, she grabs our hands and pulls us. When she is told no, she sprints away from us angrily. And sometimes, in her haste, accidentally runs into furniture. Or sometimes when she is told that she can't have something she wants, she has a 15 second meltdown. Then, she says, "Mommy, hug!" and flings her arms out. When I approach, she'll say, rather smugly, "No. No hug." I guess she's punishing me (or Daddy) by not giving us the desire of our hearts (a hug from her) when she doesn't get hers (whatever random thing she shouldn't be touching)? Have I mentioned that she's pretty smart/manipulative? Or, as a classmate of ours said, she's good at "social engineering." Haha.
• Julia has gotten better at imaginative play. Our guest bed is currently a "boat" and there are construction paper fish in the "water" (carpet) surrounding the boat. We go fishing and we also feed the fish with bits of orange construction paper, "carrots" according to Julia. Or sometimes the bed is a plane and we look at the sun, moon, clouds, and birds in the sky and buckle our seat belts and eat delicious plane food (we're using our imaginations, remember?) of Julia's choosing like "carrots," "apples" and "grapes." She has been having us dress her Sesame Street characters in her clothes, which are much too big on them and look hilarious. For instance the other day, Cookie Monster was in a pink dress. Or today, he was undressed except for white socks on his feet, which covered his tiny legs entirely, making them look like stump socks for Cookie's bilateral above the knee amputations.
• Lately, Julia doesn't want to ride in her stroller; she wants to push it. She puts stuffed animals in the umbrella stroller and tries to push it, even though it is awkwardly tall for her to handle. So, we recently took her to Toys R' Us and bought her a doll-sized umbrella stroller. It's much easier for her to handle, but she has decided that she wants US to push it around. And it's awkwardly short for us. Haha!
• Julia continues to get better and better about being polite. The other night, the three of us were at a Vietnamese restaurant, and the young women waiting tables were so enchanted with her because every time they brought anything to the table, Julia said "thank you!" very enthusiastically. They brought her fortune cookies and even folded a tiny paper crane for her. She was quite the hit.
•  One morning in Wichita, I was playing with Julia and letting Aaron sleep in a little. I needed to grab the diaper wipes out of our bedroom, though, and told Julia to wait quietly for me while I grabbed them. Instead, she followed me into the room and started yelling, "Number one daddy! Number one daddy!" Not sure where she got that, but it was pretty cute. Later, Aaron thanked her for the compliment she'd (likely unknowingly) given him, and encouraged her to say, "#1 mommy!" too. We told her that she was our "#1 Julia!" The other day in church, Julia started shouting, "#1 mommy! #1 mommy!" I'm sure the people around us were thinking we must be pretty arrogant parents to teach our daughter to parrot compliments about us! Haha!
• Julia often yells, "I'm going to get you, Mommy!" and takes off running...away from me. Haha! It means that she wants me to yell out "I'm going to get you, Julia!" and chase her until I finally catch her and tickle her. A lot. She loves it.

And we love her. A lot. Nineteen months is a lot of fun :-)

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 :-)