Living the Smith Family Dream: Countdown: 10

That's right!!! The new title to my weekly posts will be countdown, and we start at 10: just 10 weeks left until the expected arrival of our much awaited little man, Jackson Scott Smith. I mentioned this before, but I say we have 10 weeks but really, we have 7-10 weeks because who knows if he'll decided to be early! But hopefully not any earlier than that. But regardless, 10 weeks is amazing. We had a hunch that there was a baby on board at just about 5 weeks, so for 25 weeks we've known and been waiting for our little one. It's been a LONG 25 weeks, counting up to this point. And we are finally ready to start to countdown. With the school semester winding down, and baby shower invites out, I'm expecting everything to start setting in mentally very soon. And then I say... let the cleaning begin. Justin thinks I've been nesting all along, but I assure him I have not been. But I'm anticipated that will come very soon too. So anyway, here's how things have laid out:

I've actually been sick since last Tuesday, but I'm pretty sure it's an allergy thing. I wake up hacking up lots of mucus and phlegm and blowing my nose. I haven't had a voice upon waking up at all in the past week. Things progressively get better throughout the day and then in the late afternoon/early evening it all comes crashing down again with sheer exhaustion and a bad sore throat. I know I've had this before, it just sucks to have it now. But hopefully it will be gone before finals.

With that said, I was sick all day Thursday and Friday (during my exam) and then I spent my Friday night putting a poster together for my group project. UGH!!! But I got it done. (It wasn't due until today so I give myself MAJOR credit for getting it done early AND on my own). On Saturday we relaxed all morning (I laid in the sun for a little bit) and then we both worked on Saturday night. This went okay until my sore throat started kicking in. My feet also felt like lead, but that has since subsided. On Sunday Justin worked at the Federal Hill Festival on Cross Street downtown. For him this meant a day checking ID's in the hot sun, but he's worked it before and it's pretty decent money. I slept in because I was still sick and feeling like crap. When I finally did get up, I took my time getting my day started and when I finally ventured out, I visited my dad and watched some of the O's game with him. It was offered to me to go to the game with some friends, and after watching, I wish I would have. It was a great game to be at Camden Yards. I then visited my mom and then joined Justin at the Fed Hill Festival. I wanted to stop by to pay him a visit and to see what it was all about: my account of it was that it was WAY too crowded and hot for me to be there. I just don't understand the concept of ALL those people crowding on one small street to stand around (practically shoulder to shoulder) just to drink beer. I'd honestly rather go to a friend's house, lounge around and relax and drink then be there all hot and sweaty and bumping into people It just doesn't make sense. But I celebrated being there with a funnel cake and some lemonade :D THAT was worth the visit. Then it was off to work for me!

On Monday I had my evening clinical. I'm still sick at this point and don't have a voice, yet I still managed to get the difficult patient: a 2 yr old with a trach, a pacemaker, acute renal failure and a slew of other problems. It was very sad to see all the tubes and wires he was hooked up to and how tired he would get just from us having to move him around to give him his meds, suction his trach and do some other things. He seems like such a sweet little boy and unfortunately those tubes and wires is all he'll ever know. But this is the stuff I have to get used to. It ended up actually being a very boring night because the morning group gave him his bath and changed his trach, which apparantly takes a LONG time to do both, but I'll be lucky enough to experience that tomorrow morning since I'll have him again. Speaking of tomorrow morning. We decided that tomorrow would be our official last clinical day for the semester, and, instead of going to clinical Monday, we'd go as a group to the Cheesecake Factory! Fine by me :)

Anyhow, that brings me to today. I woke up very early (5:30) even though I didn't go to bed until 12, because I was coughing and blowing my nose. Seems to be how I wake up every hour these days. I decided to just stay awake since I had to be up early anyhow. Today was Scholarship Day at school so basically all nursing students go to this and listen to teachers and speakers talk about the NCLEX exam and their nursing experience. Then they give out scholarships. I of course didn't get one because I didn't apply. Unfortunately all the applications were due around exam or paper time and I've been sick a couple times already so I just wasn't able to take extra time to write essays and try to find references. Oh well. Anyhow, a portion of the day was set aside for our Poster presentations. Last year the speakers were the ones who walked around to observe the posters and ask questions, but this year the students did it, and it was pointless. Most didn't care to even look at the posters and nobody except for our research teacher asked us questions. All that hard poster work for nothing. The real presentation that counts for a grade is next Tuesday, but still, the poster isn't part of the grade. Oh well. Anyhow, a lot of the speakers used to talk about the nursing shortage and what a great field nursing was. But this year they talked about the fact that nursing is still a great field and will be in HIGH demand again very soon, but pretty much there's a job freeze for nurses because of the economy. Nurses that were going to retire can no longer afford to, nurses who did retire came back, and so on and so forth. This is not good news for us, but hopefully things will change soon. There's also a lot of issues with our summer practicum which I want to get done as soon as school ends, but the person in charge is having trouble even finding hospitals to accept nursing students this summer. Hopefully that works out sooner than later though because I'd hate to have to wait until August to do this.

After scholarship day was over, I had lunch with Julie, made a quick walmart run for scar cream and cocoa butter (for my ever expanding stretch marks which have indeed become my LEAST favorite thing about pregnancy) and then it was off to my night class. I successfully slept through half of that though because I decided to take a benadryl right before class started. Oh Well. At least I gave the professor a heads up in the beginning of class.

So two interesting things. In the other half of my class (the group who finished Peds and are now taking psyc, which I took the first half) there's another girl who is pregnant. She's maybe a month behind me but she has this perfect round basketball shaped belly. She's much taller than me, but I'm slightly envious. Then, in my night class there's a girl who's only two weeks behind me (if that) and she barely looks 20 weeks pregnant. I'm not quite as envious of her because weight is an issue for her.. she's just naturally very thin and tends to lose weight when stressed and her doctors have identified the need for her to gain more weight. But it's just interesting to see how three people very close in gestation are sooooo different.

Anyway.. without further adieu, here are some pictures:

This is 29 weeks!