It's beginning to look a lot like March Madness

I have officially set up my annual group in ESPN's tournament challenge. If any of you faithful readers did not get an invite and would like to join your bracket to the group let me know so I can email you an invitation.

Doug, having multiple brackets is pathetic and I don't want to hear about how you picked George Mason to go to the final 4 again unless it shows on the bracket in this group.

The Master Climber

So our little Kristian is now 15 months old and still has no interest in walking. Everytime we try to get him to walk he just goes right back down to a crawl. The best is when we try to get him to stand by holding under his arms. He just smiles at us and lifts up his legs. Which within 5 seconds means he's back on the floor as he is to heavy to hold as dead weight for any length of time.

However, all is not lost. He might not be interested in walking at all, but he is most definitely the best climber of his age. He can climb up on the kitchen table using a chair. He can climb on top of the kids beds using their dress-up box. He can climb up on just about anything. And yesterday he topped it all by climbing to the top of discovery park (probally 15 sets of little wooden platforms) so that he could go down the big slide. As you can imagine, this tends to keep me on my toes more than if he were walking, it is so much fun :)

Too old?

I went out to Three Peaks for a mountain bike ride this afternoon. At about the midpoint of my ride I happened to tap my front brake while riding down some relatively steep slick rock. This is a rookie mistake that I never would have made 7 years ago. I flipped over my handlebars and gave myself a bit of road rash. Unfortunately I had to finish the last 3 1/2 miles of the loop to get back to the car. The trip back required a large amount of climbing so I had ample time to lament getting older. Then just as I was almost back to the car I passed some other mountain bikers and I remembered the feeling of showing off battle wounds (if you've ever been on a mountainbike you know of the battle between rider and terrain). I don't think they were very impressed, but I felt so cool I almost forgot about the stinging wind against my left arm.


The fact that I'm actually excited to have people ask me what happened makes me feel like a teenager and if you're only as old as you feel this is a good sign.
There were also some wounds on the chin and knee, but the pictures didn't turn out too good.

Raining Babies

I'm 3 days into my current OB rotation. This OB rotation is much different than that done during my 3rd year. First of all I'm with a physician that I know which make things really nice. The other nice thing is that as a 4th year I don't feel obligated to take call (we'll have enough of that next year) so I get to see patients and deliver babies during the daylight hours then go home without any stress.

Monday was busy. During the time I was at the clinic/hospital from 8:30 AM to 6:30 PM we delivered 4 babies (2 were c-sections) and saw 41 patients. I actually had it easy because the doctor started a c-section that morning at 2 AM so his day was much longer than mine. Yesterday was filled with clinic patients and today was relatively slow except for the one delivery. Finally, 2 months from graduation, I can say that I have officially delivered a baby. It wasn't too bad.

With three fast days of OB in Cedar behind me now I'm still leaning away from practicing OB for the rest of my life. There are a lot of wonderful things that go along with OB, but I just don't think they are worth the schedule. Nothing ruins a weekend or an evening like a woman going into labor, and I don't think I want to have to be out of town anytime I'm not on call.

I spent most of last night on the couch with Jessi. She isn't feeling well (at the moment I'm the only one in the house that does feel well) and couldn't find a comfortable spot in the house at 2:30 this morning so she and I spent some time on the couch together. She did get a couple of hours sleep in my arms which hasn't happened for a couple of years so that was a little bit nice.



Jessi at a happier time.

Chicken and a Beard

Spencer learned the word inert in school the other day. Since that time he has been explaining to us which of the things in the house are inert and which are alive (apparently inert is the opposite of alive to a 5 year old). At dinner I decided to have some fun with him so we started talking about robots, both the cartoon and toy varieties (only the toy robots are inert). We were eating chicken strips for dinner and I asked him if his chicken was alive or inert. Being the genius that he is he told me that his chicken was inert. I then asked him about the chicken out on the farm. He wasn't fooled for a bit as he told me it was alive. Then came the curveball. Being the wonderful parent that I am I asked him how a chicken can be both alive and inert to which Spencer responded; "So we must have killed one". It was all downhill from there as I learned that a smashed ant is also inert.

Onto the beard: the kids were sad to see the beard go so I had to make it a bit of a game for them.

First we have the pathetic handlebar with small goatee.














shorter mustache with an even smaller goatee.

Now we have the soul patch (with mustache of course).

Melissa calls this one the spaniard.

Finally no shave is complete without a Hitler mustache, unfortunately the lack of hair growth under my nose makes it look like an hourglass on its side (that's why I call this one the Black Widow).