Month: September 2013

I think I’ve mentioned before that I get everything online – this week we got a stand alone chin up bar/dip bar, toner for the printer, and kick-ass red boots for Edda’s Halloween costume (either Wonder Woman or Super Girl). But yesterday – we actually got a shipment of ice cream in the mail!  It was a gift and it’s kind of a hoot to get something frozen in the mail – I wonder if Edda’s Rett Syndrome blood sample in 2006 that we FedExed from Singapore to Texas was frozen on dry ice (that was not as exciting as ice cream in the mail).  The dry ice that kept the ice cream frozen was appreciated by Vince who spent about an hour playing with it.

It’s so hard to find things that Edda likes to do.  We take her lots of places, but it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t spend hours a day pacing in front of Dora the Explorer videos.  It really is her preferred activity – I can almost hear the sigh of relief after a long car ride or vacation when she comes home and finds her TV just the way she left it.  And really, I would like to indulge Edda’s every whim, but everything else in the whole world seems not as satisfying as a good Dora theme song.  I suppose it is not unlike Vince’s desire to play Minecraft, nor my desire to take a nap everyday at 1:30 pm.  This year, in a fit of just-do-it-ness, I emailed around to sign Edda up for adaptive swimming classes and was ever hopeful that this was going to be the activity that Edda would love (I have gotten many positive reports from camp of Edda’s love for swimming, but the whole tedium of getting her in/out swimsuits in a wet (danger – slip and fall hazard) and public changing room and the constant fear of pooping in the pool and thus shutting the pool down for high bacteria counts has me a little overwhelmed) – but alas, I got the email back that said that Edda would not be a “good fit” for the program.

I realize that I’m doing the same thing with Vince, somehow his love of Minecraft suppresses his love for anything else – today I drove him to a trampoline class (have you seen the craziness that is Olympic trampolining?) in hopes of an activity that will stick to him for longer than a season – but we observed the class which was as expected, a bunch of tiny 6 year old girls just jumping up and down on three small trampolines in an underwhelming gym.  At least he was game enough to come check it out with me.

Here’s Edda outside school today enjoying the beautiful summer/fall weather.  I think it’s enough really.  I want it to be enough.

Nursing school started last week. I’m one of only two students (out of 50) going part time, so I’m not doing the “typical” class rotation – so no clinical this term, no patient assessment this term either – just 2 classes, straight up lectures. Even though I have my scrubs and my stethoscope – I’m not doing anything besides classroom work. I’m a little bit unnerved by the prep that the other students have done, I’m only on the third class, but it seems like everyone else well prepared and I’m, well, kind of not that well prepared. Not only are there classes Monday, Tuesday and Wed, but there are also recitation sections as well. I’ve very rarely had good experiences with recitation sections, so I’m going to go the first week and see if they are informative and then probably go it alone from there.

School is 2.5 miles from the house and classes will be held in the late afternoon and as the fall turns into winter, it’ll get dark – so Jeremy made me some kick-ass bike lights.

Paul, Jeremy’s first post-college roommate, who is an accomplished runner and coach was looking over my training plan that I’m following for my next half marathon scheduled in a few weeks.   He was at the house this weekend for a brief end-of-summer visit.  We’d never met his wife nor his kiddo before, so it was really nice to have them stay at the house.  The house is a little too big for our needs (who am I kidding – we probably only need 1000 sq feet to live in comfortably), so we generally “seal” off the basement – and don’t let the kids play alone down there because whatever stuff is in storage down there usually ends up out of storage and all over the place (Easter eggs, Christmas ornaments, ping pong balls/sports equipment – I might have even once been greeted with huge piles of feathers), but we open it up for guests and this weekend we had a full house.  Katherine is here on her way to New Mexico – we had so many guests that we moved Edda into our room, which – other than the first night when she was confused where she was when she woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep and kept us all up half the night – has been just fine.

Anyways, back to the running.  It’s been a weird running season for me (usually there is a spring running season and fall running season – so if you are training for half or full marathon, you generally have one in the spring and one in the fall – except for the crazy people who run them all the time) – my running partner got her knee really hurt by galloping dogs – nothing running related and has been on crutches for weeks and probably will be recovering for another few weeks – so my motivation has been pretty spotty for running this race.  There is nothing like doing a 9 or 10 mile run alone in the early morning to really question why one is doing the crazy thing.  We also got Edda’s new wheelchair which I thought I could take running with me (which I can and I have).  And then my ankle feels a little twing-y and my lower back is a little sore.  So the training has been a little unfocused and confused.  But Paul looked at my running plan and suggested some tweaks to it and I feel a little better about it all.  We will see what happens.