brotherly love

i snapped these pictures the other day to give a copy of one to our neighbors bob and wilma. we've gone over there a couple of times just to visit. they seem to love it and so do we! whenever we go over benny walks right in and says, "hi, wilma." then he walks back to their family room to say, "hi, bob." then he asks wilma for the toys.

while we were there on monday bob got his camera out to snap a few pictures of benny holding andy. they were really cute. he said it would be forever before he got his film developed, so after the boys got up from their naps that afternoon i took some pictures of my own. they were so glad to get a copy. wilma told me it was going right up on their fridge. we are so glad to have such great neighbors!

home

i figured that it's probably time i write something about our new home - not just meaning the house we live in. we love it - both our house and oklahoma. i was asked recently if tulsa felt like home to me. after thinking about it for just a minute, i realized that it didn't ever not feel like home. after spencer left with the moving truck and all of our stuff, i couldn't wait to join him. when i get nervous/excited i tend to talk a lot. i tend to talk a lot on a normal basis, so when i get nervous/excited, you can only imagine what it's like. you'll have to ask my mother-in-law what it was like the couple of days we had before we flew out to join spencer and his dad.

i’m grateful to be in such a great place. it’s definitely hot and humid, but we’re starting to get used to that. we got here during the hottest time of year, so at least it will only get better! at least until next august.

we have absolutely wonderful neighbors. midge and betty on one side and bob and wilma on the other. very nice people who already love our boys!

yesterday was a really good day in terms of getting the house to feel more like ours. we got our piano and i got my spoon collection out and we hung those up above the piano. i also finally hung up all of our framed pictures in our family room. i had been wanting to do that for a really long time. i love pictures. i don’t know exactly what it is, but i can sit and look at family pictures for a long time. i just love looking at everyone who means so much to us. needless to say, having our family pictures up on our wall makes it feel so much more like home.

the gist of things is that things are going really well and we love it here.

our most recent acquisition

we are thrilled to be the owners of a piano! after looking on craigslist since before we even got here, i went on wednesday with the boys to test one out. it's not perfect, but for what we paid, it's phenomenal! now we just need to get it tuned.


benny loves it too. the bench is a little too high for him to climb on alone, which isn't a bad thing; although, he has not been pounding on the keys. he loves the music and tries to mimic what i play. sometimes he even sings while he's playing. i hope he always loves music.

one year later...

i know these are repeats from our sidebar, but i couldn't believe the jump between these two family pictures. almost exactly one year apart.

18 aug 2007: benny 13 months old, walking for just over a month. i was over 15 weeks pregnant with andy. spencer getting ready to start his second senior year at byu.


16 aug 2008: we have a two-year-old who loves to walk around narrating life. his beautiful hair is much thicker. our 6 1/2-month-old loves crawling all over the place and can now pull himself up on his feet. spencer starting his first year of medical school.

this might not be interesting to anyone but me. i love seeing how much we have changed and grown. i wonder how we'll change this year.

From the horse's mouth

Hi everybody. This is Spencer and I am pleased to announce that I am officially oriented as a medical student. All in all it was a pretty fun and informative week (August 11-16). I feel better prepared for class to start tomorrow, but I can't help but think they were just lulling us into a false sense of security before the flood gates open.

We started out orientation with a day at Camp Loughridge. I thought we were going to be doing summer camp type things like canoeing and singing Kumbaya around an open fire. Instead we took a personality test and discussed the different aspects of the test (like the differences between how introverts and extroverts think). It was fun to start to get to know people in my class. That night was a dinner sponsored by the Oklahoma Osteopathic Association of which I am now a member.

Tuesday was on campus where we were introduced to the faculty, got our lockers and ID badges.

Wednesday the professors who will be teaching the labs this semester (anatomy and histology) gave us a run-down of the class- this was kinda like the first day of class at BYU where usually you just get the syllabus and leave early. Then in the afternoon they talked to us about student well-being which was a lot of stress management, mental health and the trainer from the fitness center scared everybody. This is our trainer on campus.

Thursday morning was “Med School the Musical!” put on by a bunch of second years. It was a bunch of parody songs about studying, having no life, and everything else medical school. It was pretty entertaining and a nice break from the presentations up to that point. After a few more presentations from the second years, there was a big service project planned for the afternoon. The group I was with first went to an elementary school that the med school has kind of adopted. Some took height and weight measurements, and others cleaned up the playground. I was with a group that went to the kindergarten and read stories, played games, and did anything else the teachers wanted us to do to occupy the kids' time and energy. I read stories for an hour and a half to 3 of the boys in the class. You can tell that some of the kids come from unstable homes by the way they just couldn't get enough of the attention we were giving them (they told us that something like 80% of the school is on the federal lunch program). After school got out, we went to the food bank to sort cans. Last December, this food bank received millions of cans of food. These cans have been sitting on pallets since and most of them do not have labels on them. We all learned that you can still tell what in in the can if it does not have a label-there is a 3-letter code stamped on the cans identifying the contents. After we identified the contents, the food bank has their own labels that we would then put on the cans. It is a pretty monotonous and slow process, but I found it fascinating how this group of super-competitive med students dove right in, got organized and worked at this furious pace trying to see how many cans we could get through in the hour and a half we were there. I also got pretty good at spotting botulism and otherwise unusable cans.

Friday morning we toured the OSU Medical Center. We wont be there till 3rd and 4th year for rotations, but it was a nice change of scenery. It is a decent sized hospital and even though it is a pretty old building, it is still really nice.

Saturday was the White Coat Ceremony. This was a fairly short event where a few of the second year leaders said something, the president of the medical school spoke, then we all lined up and were called one at a time on stage to have our white coats put on us. It is kinda like a symbolic transition to the medical profession. It was nice, but still kinda felt like I was being lulled.

So that was my week. I feel very comfortable here and just know this is the right school for us. I am excited for the challenges ahead (that start tomorrow) and can't see myself doing anything else.

oklahoma, oklahoma, oklahoma, oklahoma!

well, we made it. there will be more at some point (with some pictures), but for now, we all survived the trip. there were some unexpected events, but everyone got through it. i'm typing from the far corner or our bed - the only place in the house we can pick up an internet signal. ours will be hooked up on friday. expect more some time after that.

*the title of this post is a quote from "dirty rotten scoundrels." a good movie if you have the chance to see it.