We did St Nick's a little early since I'm working all weekend. My wife got me an awesome I Heart Guts shirt:



It says "I Got the Beat" in English and Japanese. BTW I'm not this guy. But I am going to try to wear this shirt in the ICU on the weekend.

We got some awesome little dinosaur toys for the kids. Schleich makes really cool dinosaur toys, which as an added bonus are not as anatomically correct as their, uh, stallions and bulls, which are kind of obscene.



We got all the kids some window suncatcher making kits and Germaine a needlepoint kit. The problem with getting the kids exciting arts-and-crafts stuff is that THEY GET EXCITED ABOUT IT AND WANT TO DO IT RIGHT THAT SECOND. Even if it's nine o'clock at night.

Also some Lindt chocolate angels because our kids are high class.

And no, Arius did not come nor did he get punched out by anybody.

So I took my son to White Castle, which produces that staple crop of the Midwest, the slider. While we're waiting for our Crave Case (yes, that's a cardboard suitcase full of the little gut-bombers) and sweet potato fries (which is like Thanksgiving, but fried), Linus asked to sit in the tall cafe-style chairs at the tall table. After he laboriously climbs into one, he tells me that if he sat in a regular chair at this table, he'd have to reach WAY WAY UP to reach his food! And if we pushed the BIG chairs over to the little tables, he'd be like a big person! And have to lean WAY WAY OVER to reach his food! Or I could sit in the big chair at the little table, and hold him upside down by his legs so he could reach his food!

So we still haven't really officially joined a homeschool group with our kids. The closest two Catholic groups are Really Far Away and In The Next State Over. I was hoping there were closer homeschool groups, but evidently they're all Protestant.

I don't have a big problem with that, until I realized (and remembered from when I was in Protestant homeschool groups in Florida, since there's no Catholics in the South) that we'd have to constantly deal with everyone's astonishment that we have (dun dun DUN) four small kids, and hear about how they're all happy with their two kids, two SUVs, and their tubes tied. And then I realized, possibly what's worse, that there'll be some family or two with fifteen kids all one year apart and all with Biblical names starting with Z, and we'll be lumped in with them.

I don't know. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad. I'm just trying to cope with the fact that we're homeschooling, but we're still kinda like normal people. Okay, we're not normal at all, but I think we're normal. I think average American families hit a lot of potholes that we're avoiding; but I don't think that being faithful Catholics and being homeschoolers means we have to be conspiracy theorists, or hyper-political conservative activists, or religious zealots, or (I really, really hate to say it) racists.

Of course, most homeschoolers or even most religious homeschoolers are not like this...Maybe I'm overreacting?

Primer is a really great movie. So is Kung Fu Panda. Not for the same reasons.

Went to the apple farm we always go to in northwest Indiana! We got only, oh, say, forty pounds of apples (which will take our children approximately 2.5 weeks to eat), fudge, freshly made donuts, popcorn balls...oh, man. We need to start going out there twice an autumn.

We built a scarecrow, and tossed some pumpkins on the lawn. We also put a small one in the turtle cage, and they're all staring at it like it's a Monolith of Food - mesmerizing yet impenetrable.

The baby is starting to stand up on her own. You know what that means...time to have another one!*

I finished my 66-page, 22,688-word care plan on an ICU patient. Holy. Cow. I'm glad I never have to write one of those again.

My brother, who couldn't find a job as a firefighter in Florida, decided to go and be one at McMurdo Station, the largest station in Antarctica, some 2,000 miles south of New Zealand. No, seriously. I mean, it's not that he hates Florida that much that he'd go to the south pole. I don't actually know how he signed up for this job. But he's going! We got him a new digital camera. I hope he starts a blog. Even just a photo blog.

I'm excited for him. I kept telling him to travel and have adventures and/or move somewhere he get some kind of good work experience, and here he's doing both. He kept talking about Antarctica or going to Iraq or Afghanistan as a contracted firefighter, but I said the penguins probably (probably—don't take it for granted) won't chop his head off and set his body on fire.

Somebody wants to advertise directly on my dumb blog. What?! Yeah, that's right. I have no idea what to do.

*Sike! For now, anyway.

Those two subject lines are not related!

Half of you probably know this, but my nine TEN month old daughter swallowed what we thought was a penny. It felt like a penny as I half-intubated her with my finger and felt it slip down her esophagus. Anyway, some time later, out comes a heart-shaped blue miraculous medal. I say we sell it on eBay, but my wife wants to give it to her on a chain for her sixteenth birthday in front of her friends.

My school sends us to an ICU for our last major care plan. The problem with ICU is that when the teacher finds you a good patient for learning and writing up, chances are it's a bad patient in terms of, oh, say, their surviving until you actually arrive at the hospital to take care of them. Which happened with me. A lactic acid level that's through the roof and a blood pH of 6.8 is not compatible with life...and it wasn't compatible with his. I feel bad for him. Even the research I had to do on him the night before my care was very educational, though - analyzing blood gas levels, treatments for acidosis (which is what most fatal conditions lead to), learning ventilator settings, etc.

Being in the ICU is fantastic. You really handle everything there. The quickest way to learn about all the different organ systems is to take care of people who has none of them working for them, and you have to do the jobs for them.

A care plan involves everything pertaining to the patient - every pathology, every treatment and intervention, everything, down to an assessment of their diet and their psychosocial stage according to Erickson. Since it's a sick ICU patient, every body system is involved: cardiac, pulmonary, renal, neuro, immune, GI, muscles, skin. It's going to be epic. 50 pages at least.

And everything has to be ciiiiiiited. The dreaded citations. Wanna check the BP? IV push atropine before they code? You can't just write that. You have to find an authority, a textbook or journal article, to cite. That's the tedious part. And it's APA format, not MLA like the rest of the world. I hate APA format.

I just entered the last and scariest semester of nursing school. This is where they grind you into the dirt like you're in boot camp, and you either cry like a baby and quit or build yourself up into the ubernurse you're supposed to be. Not that it matters anymore, though, because Japan just designed a...er...robot nurse teddy bear to replace us all?

Speaking of nursing, the baby swallowed a penny and hasn't pooped it out yet, and my wife has asked me, oh every single day what to do about it. It must be stuck. It's causing an ulcer. She must be dying of copper poisoning. Then she found out pennies have zinc, which retains the copper. So then it must be zinc poisoning. I'm kind of wary but waiting to see if it causes any problems or just comes out. We don't even know if she really swallowed it. If she suddenly spikes temp and distends her belly, we'll go to the hospital. Don't tell my instructors, or they'll make me write a care plan about it.

We went to Florida right before school started. The flight with four kids went well, actually. The two older ones are used to takeoffs and landings and busy airports. The two-year-old saw another plane on the runway and happily yelled "That plane is gonna crash into us!" And the baby liked climbing up onto our shoulders to smile at the people behind us. I'm sure she liked it better than being confined to a carseat for 20+ hours.

My parents have a really nice house out in the country, so it's nice to just take it leisurely out there. Too bad it's too big for the both of them now that the kids are gone, and it's in the middle of nowhere. But it's a great vacation house; just play with the kids in the pool and run around the yard. They're horse-sitting two horses, too. Then we were off to St. Augustine, America's oldest city, taken over by various times by pirates. St. A, unlike the rest of Florida and most of the US, is very Old World. I like it a lot. I think I've recommended the Pirate Haus before, which is a great little hostel/lodge, fantastic family rooms with bunk beds and lively artwork on all the walls, right in the middle of the old downtown, and if you're single you have no excuse not to stay there because it's like $20 for a bunk. Free pancakes too! The kids love it.

Every day since our return from Florida I've managed to jog or lift (small wimpy) weights. I was further inspired by finding the hundred push-ups site and the associated 200 sit-ups site. Also the various fat-lazy-couch-potato to 5k running plans. Yesterday I ran/walked/ran/walked a whole 3 miles (which is about 5k, right?), and then walked the same route (3 mi) with the wife and kids to get a milkshake and my legs don't feel like total silly putty. Of course, then I had to work on a THIRTY PAGE NURSING CARE PLAN on lung cancer surgery and COPD, so my legs are actually permanently contracted into a sitting position.

There's a cute 9 month old baby girl with a big plastic banana in her mouth trying to climb up into my lap, and I hear bloodcurdling screaming from two of the other kids trying to murder each other, so I gotta go.

Was just at the bank across the street from us, standing at the desk talking to the clerk, and I look out the window and see my two-year old walking down the opposite sidewalk in a shirt and diaper. Just strolling, lookin' at puddles. The clerk is talking to me and I'm thinking...um...so maybe my wife notices and will get him...um...okay, nobody noticed he left...er..."Hey, sorry, but can you wait right here? I just saw my kid walking down the street. I think he escaped." I run-run-run and grab him, run-run-run to the house and toss him back in the front door shouting to my wife, and run-run-run back to the bank and in the door and breathlessly thank the clerk for waiting. People probably thought I was crazy. The cop at the bank said "Good deed for the day, eh?" But I don't think it counts when it's your kid!

And here's what transpired last night:
4yo boy: walks into kitchen talking about something, stops midsentence to start waddling funny and letting out loud farts
2yo boy: doesn't look up from reading a book on the floor, says "Baby, dat's gross!"
baby: clueless, unable to defend herself
4yo boy: "That was just me, I was bein' silly and burpin' out of my butt!!"
5yo girl: peals of laughter

My employer is advertising on my user info page! Kinda weird. I should get a bonus for that.*



My two-year-old got into poison sumac which was growing in the more abandoned-to-nature portion of our backyard, and had the most awful blisters on his hands. Poison sumac is like poison ivy, same chemical (urushiol oil), but much more potent. He had blisters like I've only seen on dying kidney failure patients. He doesn't seem to mind them, but doesn't like you touching them. Lots of calomine lotion! My wife was not alarmed because apparently her sister used to get the same hideous leprotic blisters from poison ivy. What I can't get over is the fact that some of the plants had huge root balls or large woody stems. They had to have been there last year, when I was tearing plants out of there. I guess I either didn't have a reaction or had a mild enough one that I didn't notice. But he had to have been back there, too. None of my other children had a reaction. It's strange having one particularly allergy-prone child. Having four small kids is like making a Punnett square but not being sure what your initial genotypes are.

(I just noticed my wife created a plants of doom tag for her post about this.)

Speaking of the wife, Adrienne is making a boatload of chocolate truffles (mint, orange, and raspberry) for the Memorial Day party with her new candy molds.

All of our plants have failed to die so far. I even tore out and potted some chunks of oregano. Anybody want some? Although I hate to say it, but this year it just smells like a plant. Last year it actually smelled like pizza.

*Disclaimer: my employer does not endorse anything I ever say, write, do, or think, except maybe when I'm behaving well at work.

I noticed the two older kids were in the bedroom with the door shut. I came inside and L said in this voice like I was intruding, "Daddy, we're playing WAR." G said "No! We're playing tea." L says "Uh huh. AND war."

Tea and war - good book name?

Poll #1399367 Kids on a Plane
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 14

You're planning to fly with FOUR...SMALL...CHILDREN. When is the least offensive time to confine 300 hapless strangers in a small metal tube with you?

What would you bring?

Redeeming points

• My kids are reasonably well-behaved 87% of the time
• we've done this before with three kids
• we're flying to Florida in the summer, potentially with lots of other small children who will, I hope, be much more ill-behaved by comparison.

We put our plants in the garden over the weekend—the few sad sprouts which survived our attempt at establishing indoor seedlings, plus a bunch from the nursery. So far in the tally we've got a couple bean plants, eleven basil plants (not sure that'll be enough!), four cilantro, two dill, four zucchini, one cherry tomato, one strawberry, a whole head of garlic, and a chamomile. Also several kinds of lettuce.

A few things survived the winter, which was quite surprising: oregano (which wants to take over the garden/yard/Earth), sage, and rue (never figured out what to do with rue). Several lettuce plants popped up, offspring from when we let our lettuce go to flower late last year. I'm wondering if we should plan for that next time; have a revolving lettuce garden that replants itself. The rosemary, which I had hoped would survive, did not. It had survived until February, when we had a string of way-below-zero temps, so I think I'll try another plant and hope next winter isn't seven years long and imported from Minnesota, like this year's was.

We also have a pumpkin and a watermelon plant. Our watermelon last year produced prize specimens, if you prize softball-sized watermelons that are completely green and white on the inside. The squirrels prized them. I think we're going to do a separate patch, apart from the garden.

We planted with little regard to location or sun, since we don't really have our own yard. When we do, I'd like to put together a list of which plants prefer direct sun versus shade. Most of the vegetables and herbs seem to want direct sun. Other things I want to look into when we own a yard and I make more money: organic fertilizers (my mom's recommending fish emulsion), how to prepare the soil for the next year, and how to not slaughter indoor seedlings since our frost season is so late (someone told me never to bother planting till after Mother's Day). I purchased a guidebook to planting in Illinois, but it's 1. not very informative or thorough, and 2. mostly covers flowers and roses and other inedible, and therefore less interesting, plants. There's got to be information specific to Chicago.

Wonder if I could try a tea plant, even though it probably wouldn't survive our winter. Also, rumor has it that a lady at work has been successfully keeping a fig tree alive in her backyard.

For some reason I'm not excited about composting, but I could look into that. I wonder if the contents of baby diapers are compostable, since we seem to have a surplus of that.

My in-laws found all the pieces to their old TI-99/4a home computer. It's pretty sweet, but the only keys that work are 1, 2, Q, D, and the space bar. No sound. The joystick works but you have to really jam the fire button. Anyway, my kids think it's a blast. They love slamming the cartridges in and flipping it on. They usually need help starting the game, because if left to their own devices they end up in the BASIC programming screen—although they're happy to fill up the screen with the above-mentioned characters.

Last night I tried playing Hunt the Wumpus, and my four-year-old daughter is yelling at me "Green circle means you fall in the pit, Dad!!"



They also knew when the Wumpus was coming, but I didn't. I think they were frustrated when I got eaten.

They like Car Wars and A-maze-ing the best, though.

I mean, some of these games came out before I was born! But they love it. I had a chorus of toddlers yelling "Pick the cheese hunt!" I think it's more on their level than, say, the Wii. I'll try to find some DIY repair sites and see if we can get sound and more keys working...

Today I remembered how I used to say, as a teenager, that I wanted to space my children 18 years apart.* I think what brought that memory to my mind was taking all three children (the ambulatory ones) at once to the church bathroom after mass. I had two kids yanking down their pants and trying to butt each other off the toilet at once, and the other child is turning on the faucet full blast in order to fill a tiny little paper cup, spraying himself and everything around him. :) I wasn't mad...it's just funny to think that I used to be that guy (though it was mostly sarcasm, and a little fear), and now I'm...the guy with four small kids.

Then I herd them all out to the car, which is a little bit harder than herding cats, and as we're strapping them in, two of them are happily screaming at each other, I think another one was trying to belt out a song from The Sound of Music but without using the correct words, or indeed English words, and the baby is sputtering and spitting raspberries as hard as she can.

Now they're in the bath together, and the two year old is putting his hand over the faucet because it makes it spray everything, and it makes his brother scream. I've got the baby who's very earnestly trying to smack the keyboard as much as I am.

*I also used to say I'd send my kids to military school for 2, 8, or 18 years. My wife would so not marry me for saying things like that.

Today I left with my mp3 player and my satchel bag thing (MANPURSE!), and rode public transportation to college. It made me feel like a Chicagoan again.

Most of my life is still taken up with school (pediatric rotation) and work, and this summer I'll be working two jobs: the general ICU I currently work in as a tech, and the neuro/surgical/trauma ICU at Christ Hospital as a student nurse. Gonna be interesting: lots of gunshots, motor vehicle accidents, etc. The first question the preceptor asked me was "Ever see an open abdomen?"

It seems all I've been doing at work lately is wrestling drunks. They come in the ER for one thing (say, diabetes complications or stroke), get sent to the medical floor, and then come back to us on day 2 or 3 acting like a complete animal because they haven't had a drink for two days. They don't know where they are or what they're doing. DTs are not cool.

I also got stuck with a dirty needle carelessly left out. I blogged about it and the post was featured in the nursing blog carnival Change of Shift, hosted this week over at codeblog. I expect my readership to increase 7,000%, over the current readership of, let me check, 0. :)

The kids? My children are fantastic. My six month old daughter is super cute and thinks I'm the greatest. My other daughter will be five soon, counts to a hundred to herself when she's bored, and is drawing better every day. My two sons ask questions all day long and get dressed, strip naked, and get redressed several times a day—in their own clothes or in my shirts. They just march in, yank the drawer open (I think the older one, who's almost four, does this), and grab a shirt. My guess is they'll probably keep doing this for the next sixteen years, except it'll probably be my socks by then.

No, we're not pregnant again yet. And because of the needlestick, you don't have to ask for the next six months! o_0

I've been baking when I should be blogging and ambling around online. I have a sourdough culture in the laundry room (don't worry, it's only there because it's warm) that I began when I discovered that my quart jar full of baker's yeast was completely dead. I've been successfully using it to rise breads, rolls, and English muffins. All it took was a little flour and water in a warm place, and then a little more the next day, and a little more on day three, which is when it tripled in size - ever since then, I've been feeding Curtis (as I call the billions of madly reproducing yeasts and lactobacilli) with flour and water twice a day, or storing him in the fridge. Sometimes he smells good, sometimes he smells alcoholic. Kinda like some people I know. Okay not really.

I want to write a story where the economy collapses, and laboratory-derived factory-made storebought yeast becomes unavailable, and so sourdough bakers, being the only ones who can supply the world with bread, become an elite class.

I've made rye bread, wheat bread, English muffins, English muffin bread (which is the best recipe and the most popular in this house so far). I really want to make bagels. And CINNAMON ROLLS! Go look at those pictures. Total food pr0n. If I can make something that looks like that, I could retire and open a bakery.

I'm also trying to make sauerkraut. It looks and smells rotting but my wife says she thinks it's fine. She's part German.

Incidentally today is the eight year anniversary of the first time I ever ate sauerkraut. That was on my first date (or non-date?) with my wife. I told her I thought it was made out of onions and she still laughs at me.

Paczis are big round danishes, like jelly donuts, that Polish people eat on Fat Tuesday. I suppose they should be called polishes, not danishes. Anyway, after discussing with my mother-in-law about how crummy paczkis usually are—they're like cheap jelly-filled donuts, full of colored goo which probably has the same fruit flavoring used for cough syrup—and how Polish people and other Chicagoans pretend that they like them and imagine they're not just jelly donuts made in a sphere shape...I went and bought some today. The hospital where I have clinical had paczkis filled with real fresh strawberries (in glaze) and cream. Instead of being a whole donut, it was two halves smashed together with the filling oozing out. In fact, they looked a lot like big zeppolis that are made for St. Joseph's Day, and I think Italians must have made them.

I stopped at Wolf's bakery on the way home, but the only flavors they had were prune (my wife said "sounds like a flavor Polish people would make") and apricot. So I went to Naples Bakery. They didn't have strawberry, but they had chocolate buttercream and cream cheese with sugar. Yum.

They're pronounced "poon-shkies" or "pon-shkies" which is why Polish people should have their own alphabet.

For some dumb reason I thought it would be a good idea to start a blog. Now I'm torn between updating here and there. I'm torn because I still like Livejournal's layout, its community environment, and to boot I actually have a chance of being read here.

So if you want to read nursing- and health-related blah blah blah, you can see the blog. I'm not telling you the name because I'm embarrassed about it. It was suggested by one of our midwives, but she probably wasn't serious.

I could use some suggestions. I've been browsing Blogging Basics 101 and others, but I'm the only person I know in real life who reads blogs (except my wife when she reads Cakewrecks) so I welcome advice. I'm a little concerned about blogging in the healthcare profession—I'm pretty sure I know my rights to blog vis-a-vis HIPAA and privacy standards, but I'm a little hesitant to betray anonymity (I'm sure some healthcare employers would rather just fire you than think about whether you really broke HIPAA or not), and less clear on whether I can be construed as giving medical advice.

My bro-in-law was hollering that he couldn't find the sliced onions for the hamburgers we're having tonight, and I told him there's probably half an onion in the door of the fridge, where his family has always stored their cut-up onions. So then he starts barking that it probably wasn't there until I saw it there, and I'm like....so what, Shrödinger (yes I said it with an umlaut) was just this crabby guy who lived with his mom and he was like "ARGH, where's my stupid cat?!" and someone said "it's right there, where it's been sitting all day" and he's like "It probably wasn't there until I observed it there!" and then he made the theory?

Okay, story's not that funny. Whatever. If you look away from this post, it will disappear from your friends page.

Probably the #1 thing I'm taking away from this crash-course in hospital birthing is how unpleasant it would be to be a father at a hospital birth. Fathers are kind of useless spare tires in the hospital delivery room: you're there for emotional support if the mother needs you, but the staff assumes she won't—her emotional support is the doctor and the epidural. Other than that, what do you do? There's not even room by these beds for dads. They don't strap women's legs into the lithotomy stirrups anymore, so a dad might be able to hold up a leg if the nurses let him.

I can't imagine being a dad watching helplessly while my wife is in this big contraption:



Or this:



Or this one, made by a railway manufacturer (see the site):



I think you can drive this down the street and shoot babies at people. It's like a first person shooter. But seriously - look at the physical distance this bed makes around the woman. No one can really approach her except whoever's brave enough to get in the birthing crosshairs.

I'm sure lots of dads have wonderful experiences at the hospital. But after being with my wife, at home, helping into whatever position she wants for labor, I couldn't tolerate just standing there. I tried to find images of dads holding up moms for labor, but they seems scarce. But the last two births, I held my wife while she was laboring standing up. She delivered the last one standing up. I had an actual job to do. I even had to go to the bathroom at one point, but I was afraid to ask! Who else was going to hold her?

I've only seen one dad at a birth, and he was looking unhappy, looking useless, not knowing where to stand, not knowing what to say, crying, unsure if he should approach the bed, and then unsure he should approach the baby - but craning his neck to see her across the room in the heated baby contraption they put her in for the initial assessment. I was with his baby, and he was not. I felt like grabbing him and pulling him over. It was awful.

Dads in the hospital room can be jettisoned by the staff at their discretion, which means they aren't necessary. What does that do to the dad? Maybe this or that dad doesn't care, but this has to affect the male psyche in our country, or any country where this is a common childbirth practice.