storms, star wars and summer

friday morning i rolled over in bed and noticed donald looking at me intently as if he wanted me to wake up. i mumbled some incoherent jargon questioning why in the world he would be waking me up at the crack of 9:30 in the morning. and then we had this conversation:

d: i think the power is still out.

s: okay.  did it storm?

d: yes, it was very bad. it looked like a monsoon outside. i considered waking you up so we could go to the basement.

s: [rolls eyes] i'm sure it wasn't that bad.

fast forward a few minutes. donald looks out the window and sees that one of our [very large] backyard trees has fallen into the power lines that run parallel to our house and all the lines connecting the pole to our house had been pulled away and were lying in the yard. i guess there was a storm after all.

this kicked off our already fun filled weekend a little early. after a bit of sitting around and twiddling our thumbs [what did people do with themselves before the internet] we ventured outside and determined we would not be back on the grid for awhile. so we packed up dag, along with the contents of our refrigerator, and moved in with biscuit and pep pep. between that, swapping stories with the neighbors and trying to squeeze in a little homework it was all of a sudden time for jedi nights.

i love our church for a lot of different reasons. sometimes i like to think lakeland exists because God thought it would be fun to have a church just for people like donald. the ratio of sci-fi/fantasy movie enthusiast to regular people is surprisingly low. as you might imagine, the anticipation of the upcoming star wars movie is quite high and out of that came a fun event for kids and parents called jedi nights. and when lakeland does an event like this, they do it up right. donald was tapped to be darth vader and i know i am biased, but he stole the show. the church rented a pretty serious vader costume and that combined with the light saber moves donald has been practicing for a couple decades made for an epic performance. we did almost lose him to heat exhaustion a couple time [that costume was hot!] but he persevered and the kids totally loved it.

then came saturday and a day of lake fun! scott and ali were in town so the king's invited a bunch of sbu-ers down for a little reunion. i had been trying to concoct a plan that did not include driving down and back in a day, but with all the other excitement that's what ended up happening. we left at 7:30am [yuck] and didn't roll back into raytona until 1am the next morning. the drive was brutal but the day was awesome! we spent twelve hours chillin' by the water with our college friends and their twenty six kids. we took the boat out, swam off the dock, rode jet skis and laid in the sun [well, some of us sat in the shade]. it was good times.

by sunday i felt like a walking zombie but it was totally worth it. our tree is still lying in its sad, mangled state but thankfully we hopped back on the power grid sunday afternoon.

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the struggle is real

ah...nursing school.  such an elusive little thing.

donald has worked on the psych unit at ku med ever since he graduated from sbu. he likes it and he's good at it. [like, really good at it] the trick is that there is really only one position you can hold in a hospital with a psychology degree and he already has it. so in order for it to make sense for him to stay there forever, which he would love, the most logical option is for him to become a nurse.

nursing school was already on our radar when we were engaged, and we knew it would be a future goal for our family. however in my naiveté i thought we'd be wrapping things up in the school department by about year three of our marriage. donald didn't want to jump right into school during our few months of marriage, but i figured he'd just need a year of pre reqs and then a year or so at an accelerated program and we'd call it a day. that was so cute of me.

what i have learned is that attempting to complete nursing school as a non-traditional adult student is like trying to lick your elbow. it's nearly impossible.

here are some examples:

after spending two months incessantly attempting to get ahold of the supervisor of the nursing program to discuss donald's transcript were were finally informed that donald, who has a bachelors degree in psychology and has worked in the psychology field for ten years, needed to take psychology 101 before he could submit his application to the nursing program. this information was very conveniently shared 48 hours after the cutoff for enrolling in summer classes. so that was fun.

and while we're on the subject of silly, freshmen level pre-reqs...we both thought college algebra was going to kill us dead. it did not. but it was close.

then this one is my favorite [so far]. without going into all the specifics, as soon as donald finishes his rn program he'll need to begin a bsn bridge program right away. our track record being what it is, we decided to be as proactive as possible and once he was accepted into an rn program we turned our sights to the bsn bridge to see if we could get a jump on things. 

to back up, going into this whole thing there were two classes donald did not ever want to have to take again...speech and statistics.  the bsn program needed a stats pre-req and there was a question as to whether they would accept the credit he had from sbu.  so there was this exchange:

monday @ 2:12pm : your stats class won't transfer, you'll need to take it again .

[panic. sorrow. gnashing of teeth.]

monday @ 2:18pm : your stats class is fine, you don't need to take it again.

[relief. hesitant celebration.]

wednesday afternoon : we can't accept your stats, you'll need to take it again.

[confusion. defeat.]

later wednesday afternoon: oh, i remember talking to you!  you're fine.  you don't need to take stats again.

[blank stares.]

i'm sure that one day [i'd like to say five years, but i think ten is the safer bet] we will look back, laugh, and think it really didn't take that long after all. today is not that day, but i'm doing my best to just enjoy the ride.

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eat like you mean it

our spring break adventure was a seven day caribbean cruise with my mom, donald and i. while the ports are great and all, i honestly have to say we were mostly there for the 24/7 food [and i was also in it for the sunshine, though not everyone shared that sentiment]. some friends of ours recently went on a 'love like you mean it' marriage cruise, so it obviously made sense for us to name our voyage the 'eat like you mean it' cruise.  our days at sea looked a little something like this:

• wake up
• eat breakfast
• attend trivia activity
• grab a snack
• find a comfy chair/bed in the quiet zone and lay in the sun [one of us did not participate in this activity]
• eat lunch
• attend trivia activity
• grab a snack
• lay in the sun and take a dip in the adult only pool [see note above]
• get ready for dinner
• eat a three [or four or five] course dinner
• go to a show or watch an outdoor movie
• eat second dinner [always heavily revolving around nutella crepes]
• play cards [specifically mastering the art of three handed canasta]
• go to sleep

i’d like to say this list is exaggerated, but that would be lying. we did meander off the ship a bit when we were in port. donald stuck with me for an adventurous climb up dunn’s river falls in jamaica, and he also loving endured a day at the beach in grand cayman…i was in my happy place strolling the beach and floating in my tube, he and my mom were under an umbrella in their beach chairs. 

we spent an extra night in miami on our way back home and i managed to coerce my two compadres into accompanying me on one last outing. we requested our first ever uber, rode over to south beach, ate some delicious burgers from the shake shack and strolled to the beach for one last chance to get my feet in the water and sand between my toes.  [full disclosure: they later both admitted to enjoying the excursion]

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