Finally got the kitten pictures back, Tony forgot to get the first ones on disc so I could upload them.They are getting bigger now! The other day Princess got her claws caught on the curtain and it was swinging back and forth while she was trying to get unstuck...Piper had been lying in the sun in the window, so she turned around and started jumping at the inside of the curtain every time it swung towards her. I probably should have gone to help, but I was laughing too hard:)
From AOL Journal Editor Jeff came this link to Ishkur for 'motivational posters'. LMAO at the ones that poke fun at the Internet and bloggers. These posters look like something "Matt Foley" would've promoted,LOL.
(And for those of you who don't know..."I live in a van down by the river" and "Holy Shnykees" are both recurring phrases in my family....tells you a lot about us, doesn't it?:)
1.Aiden
2.Aiden and his dad,my son Ben (wow,that's freaky to say,lol)
3.Ben,Emma, and Aiden
4.April and her new nephew
5.The happy new Grandma and baby
6.Emma and Aiden
7. Three generations...Ben's dad,Ben, and Aiden
Yikes, I knew I didn't copy this announcement someplace before I went to bed,LOL.
MY FIRST GRANDSON IS HERE!!:)
Little Aiden arrived at 9:09 a.m this morning:) He is, of course, completely beautiful! He weighed 7 lbs. 13 oz, and has a big thatch of black hair.
My son, his father, is awed and estatic. Aiden's mother was glowing, and all the assorted grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides of the family were overjoyed!
I am heading off to catch a few hours of sleep, as I have to work again the night shift, and will be going back to the hospital this evening so I can hold him for the first time. So far, this grandparenting stuff seems way cool to me!!!!
Back awake--4:56 p.m.
Obviously, I slept about 4 whole hours, and now April is agitating for us to leave for the hospital as soon as possible!!
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And I didn't know this was going to happen today, but it's very nice 'icing on the cake' for such a special day for me. I had submitted one of my blog posts to CarnivAOL and it got accepted for this week,wow!
Tomorrow little Aiden Benjamin is scheduled to arrive into the world!!:) I'll be a Grandma, and Tracy and Adam will be Godparents:)
I have been wanting to try to make a 'Woo Hoo' since I first saw one,LOL. (You have to have an AIM pages profile, and add pics to it, to be able to make one.)
So,here goes.....hope this works!!:)
Well, I did a post on my 'public' AOL journal, Mail Call! Supporting the Troops about the 3rd Anniversary for AOL Journals
and then I played around after I got home from work this morning with my 'Favorite Sites' and 'Other Journals' links on THIS journal, so if you want to go check them out, I put up some friend's sites and some journals that I don't have linked on the other one....and I also put all the pages of recovering soldiers I've featured on the other journal over here, so I can keep track of them.
And under the 'geek excitement' heading,lol, isn't the Flickr badge on the left totally cool!! I have wanted one for so long....do I have a really sad life,rofl,or what!
I've also put the links to all my other places on the web,lol, so you can say "Kathi is too many darn places on the Internet" or alternatively, "Kathi needs to get a life!":)
FOUR MORE DAYS TILL GRANDBABY AIDEN ARRIVES!!!
Hope everyone has a great week...April starts school tomorrow, and I am off this evening,yay!
UPDATE Added the pic that Sepintx (the blogger who told how to add the Flickr badge) created, out of the 3 I sent him, for the AOL Anniversary album.......had no idea he'd put them together like that, just thought it was 'neat'.:) And I also added his regular photoblog to the sidebar.
Sorry it took me so long to post again, been a busy week. Just got home from working 6 days straight between the two jobs and I am OFF WORK TONIGHT,Yay!!! (and then work the weekend:(
Let's see....the job has been going OK, my manager is a little bit snarky. I've only had two days of orientation to a 52 bed unit that has currently 47 patients, and have been getting done everything that I've been shown to do. And yet, she always comes in in the morning and says "oh, you didn't do THIS? Weren't you ever shown to also do THIS?" Definitely a "glass half-empty" type personality.
However, the feedback I'm getting from the nurse's aides who work with me every night, and from some other nurse's, is that I am doing a bang up job, so I just let her comments roll off my back.
Had a humorous evening,I think Monday or Tuesday night (11 pm to 7 am shift)...my days have kind of begun to run together,lol,(but I know for sure that it's FRIDAY today!!!)
Picture me in a room with a patient who is deaf, half blind, cadaver-thin, and in the middle of throwing a 'snit fit' while she's also having a nosebleed at the same time. She refuses to use her 'communication board", so this entire episode took place in pantomime(on her part, I kept talking to her, which was silly,being as she was deaf:)
While our(the aides and I) main concern was getting the nose bleed stopped, HER main concern was that she also wanted to use the bedpan at the same time....and she was repeatedly pointing to her stomach, and then grunting, and balling her hands into fists and punching them together.
I realized how good I had become at charades,lol, when a light dawned and I said "OH! You're CONSTIPATED!" and then, remembering she was deaf....ran down the hall and grabbed a bottle of milk of magnesia and ran back and held it very close to her face and pointed at it....and she NODDED:)
THAT problem being solved, and the nosebleed being finally stopped...I started back down the hall and went past the room of a man where we had earlier left a urinal because we needed to attempt to get a specimen from him later.
He is generally very confused,but now he is BEAMING at me, and pointing to the urinal and saying "I did it." And I am clapping my hands and smiling and saying "Wow, you DID do it....Good for you!!" And one of my aides is coming up the hall and I am smiling at her and saying "Wow, we got the specimen" and she is beaming and congratulatinghim also....so here we all are in a giant lovefest over a body function,lol, and between that and my successful interpretation of the little lady's charade, I am wondering somewhere in the back of my head "How on earth do I ever explain to people exactly what my job consists of sometimes?"LOL.
Wednesday night, Tony and April and I went to the fair. http://www.rockinghamcountyfair.com/ April took off to ride the rides, and Tony and I spent an inordinate amount of time in lines trying to get food:) because the one line we were in for 20 minutes, then they announced that they were temporarily out of pork bbq sandwiches, so we had to go get in ANOTHER line. And then we walked around and looked at sheep, and pigs (I really like pigs:) and cattle and miniature horses.....and then Tony broke out in a cold sweat and turned extremely pale and realized he was getting sick...so we ended up leaving an hour earlier than we intended. (but April had already gotten her free tetanus shot, which proves I guess that you can do just about ANYTHING at the fair:) Except I never got a funnel cake !
Somewhere in the week, April and Tony also went to pick up a kitten for Dustin from a friend of April's,since he decided that he wanted some kittens after all...and none of us were willing to give up one of our 3 kittens.(and yes, pictures are coming sometime,but....ahem...since some of us are still waiting for my MOM to post pictures from their trip to Hong Kong a YEAR ago!!!!...I don't want to hear any complaints over how long it's taking me to get them posted,LOL.)And April had 9th grade orientation at the high school yesterday, as school starts on Aug.22.
But, the BIG NEWS (and I hope I'm not letting the cat out of the bag here, I think they've had time to phone everyone in the family) is that Ben and Emma called yesterday and MY GRANDSON SHOULD BE ARRIVING NEXT THURSDAY!!!!!!! via C-section.
So then, after we finally are able to welcome little Aiden Benjamin (who actually, I think, is going to be quite a large baby:) to the world, then the next big event in our family needs to be for Tracy and Adam to get to China and get THEIR baby!!!
And that, I believe, is my round-up of our exciting life for now. I'm getting sleepy, so I want to go nap a little bit. :)
What a weekend! I had gotten my schedule for the new job(the 11 pm to 7 am job) changed and covered an 11 pm to 7 am shift Sat night/Sun morning. Naturally, Murphy's law came into play, and I had a resident end up on the floor(no injury, but of course that generated tons of paperwork,lol).....so I got out of work late that morning, and was already committed to working 3 pm to 11 pm at the 'old' job (which I'm keeping for awhile on a 'PRN' or "as needed" basis.) Since my drive is a half hour (on a good day, whenI can run with the truckers,lol)by the time I got home I got about 3 1/2 hrs of sleep and then was getting up and hitting the road again.
My coworker last evening was cracking up laughing at me, I just KEPT MOVING..she finally said "Are you afraid if you sit down, you'll fall asleep?" and I replied "Yes!"
and went to find something else to do so I could keep moving. I liked that job a lot, it was just that the shift didn't work at all with my family life. 11 pm to 7 am isn't optimal either, but at least I'm home in the evenings...very important! with a daughter entering high school. (I think:) I had to laugh Sat evening, one of my coworkers made the comment (prior to the fall) "Nurses on 11 to 7 shift don't work that hard...I guess that's why you took it?" ROFL....is that another way of telling me I look like a lazy slug?? or did you just not think that sentence out completely before you started talking? I just smiled and told her "No, I took it because there wasn't any day shift available, and I think it's important for me to be home in the evenings."
So then,of course, when I got home I COULDN'T sleep....too keyed up (and had ingested too much coffee.
) Finally crashed about 4 am, and slept until 3 pm today!!! Maybe someday my sleep pattern will get adjusted,LOL.
Found lots of cool things to do for troop support on the 'net, at least, as always, you can swing by Mail Call! to check it out.
School starts for April on the 22nd of August,so that's fast approaching, as is my impending 'grandmotherhood'
Tony is in 'Hog heaven'(pun intended) as football season gears up, and his beloved Redskins begin their play. Good thing he also likes soccer! as the World Cup tided him over through the 'football withdrawel' months.
Well, that's enough of my 'oh so interesting' life, I guess. PTI is on ESPN, that's a 'must see' in our house(although it's never as good without Kornhiser and Wilbon together,I think.)
Hope everyone has a good week!
I had the honor tonight of receiving an email from a Vietnam Veteran. I answered his email,and we "talked" back and forth for awhile.
To my surprise and awe, later in the evening he sent this email.
ONLY ONE DAY LEFT...to help out with the HAPPY BIRTHDAY,HERO! email project over at Yikes!
All you need to do is send an email What a simple way to say 'thanks' to a recently returned veteran!
(and after that,my sis has a new post up!
"And now,for something completely different"(to quote Monty Python's Flying Circus:)
From my friend Missy , comes a link to this video...just thought I'd share a Sunday smile!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5628733099857233320&sourceid=top100newfeed
"Radio Disney,Crazy Frog".
Teacher blogging "A Ride to Remember"
This is the blog of a teacher who is riding cross country in the "Ride to Remember"
http://cferek.learnerblogs.org/
Our local paper wrote about her blog today,so I checked it out. and then found this about the "Ride to Remember"
http://dynamic.firehouse.com/calendar/index.jsp?eID=169
which led me to this, where the schedule is listed
http://www.thechristianfirefighters.com/events.html
so just wanted to pass that on!!
And in the 'personal news' dept.....I still may possibly have a small blood clot in a vein. So am off till Monday....geez, doesn't everyone start a job and then say "hey, this is your new employee and I'm calling off for the first 4 days I'm scheduled!!!"
OK, I DIDN'T get to start the new job this evening. I came home from work last night ( and I'm going to hang around there awhile on a PRN..."as needed"...basis) and my left calf was really aching. I couldn't remember bumping into anything, but figured I might have (being a 'dork' and all.)
So this afternoon, when it was still pretty bad pain...thought,hmm,maybe I should check this out. Then the doc told me that it was POSSIBLY a blood clot(which had occurred to me, being a nurse and all,lol, but so had DENIAL,as this was a very uncool time for this to be happening.)So I went to the ER, and THANK GOD it was NOT a blood clot....but they did tell me to keep it elevated,stay off it tonight, yatta yatta yatta. (possibly a muscle strain.) So, thus went my first night at the new job...I had to call off. Love making that all important first impression like this,but they were very nice about it.(and yes,Mom,my leg is elevated while I'm here on the computer!)
I HAVE to be there tomorrow night, as I will be by myself on Sat. night...I think a one night orientation is pretty important prior to being by myself!!(File that under 'how to make your job more challenging and interesting right from the start')I've been an agency nurse off and on for years, and gone into places with no orientation, and both myself and my patients for that shift have survived...but it's not my first pick for how to start my new full time job.
And that's enough about 'my dorky life'....I'm going to post this on Mail Call ,but also wanted to mention it here.......this is a wounded soldier whose family could use some encouragement,via Andi's World
Click here: Welcome To Andi's World: A Hero and His Family Need Your Help
and his CaringBridge page is here Ethan Biggers
Please consider going by and leaving a word of encouragement for the family on the page.
I realize it might be redundant to post this here and also on Mail Call! (my AOL journal) but what the heck, I guess it saves y'all time from clicking over there,lol.
Starting off with yet another gratuitous pic from our 2003 Hawaii vacation (which is the whole reason I started the 'surfing' post idea anywayjust because I love sharing the pics!) I'm going to try and squeeze a post in before I make supper (for everyone else in the house) before I leave for work. Only two more days at this job! and then I switch to a better shift,yay!
First up, the BearCreekLedger has an update on the Camp Pendleton 8.
