Conversations with the future doctor

...you know this will be good...

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Hubby:  {insert random medical goodness that I don't even begin to understand and may-or-may-not be tuning out slightly...yadda yadda yadda....talking with classmates about something from lecture...then my ears perk up for these three words} "The warm carpet."

Me: "Wait, what?  The carpet is warm at school?"

Hubby: "That's not the point."  {begins to return to med-speak}

Me: "But wait, is the floor really warm?  Like, in every room of the building?"

Hubby: "Yes."

Me:  "That's so strange, why would the carpet feel warm??"

Hubby: "Because they heat the building by running hot water through all the floors."

Me: "Seriously?  Wait.  How do you know this? How do you discover that the floors are warm???"

Hubby: "Well, honey, we spend a lot of time there.  Sometimes, we get tired and lay on the floors.  And they are warm."

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HA!  Future doctors of America, ladies and gentlemen.

Have a great Thanksgiving weekend!  Baking some crusty bread as we speak/type & read
for tomorrow's feast at my parents house. 

Oh, and here's my confession photo:

It's been Christmas at our house for a week already!  Never in my life have I decorated before Thanksgiving...it's normally the weekend after Thanksgiving. 

But what can I say - It's our first Christmas together, and we couldn't wait to decorate!  

AND those are presents for me under the tree.  Way to go hubby!

Christmas Card Season

Writing to you from the in-laws house this morning, where it is a balmy 26 degrees outside.  We'll be celebrating early Thanksgiving today, which has me thinking: Where in the WORLD did November go?   I need to start thinking about, create, and mail out Christmas cards in the next couple of weeks!  Yikes!

Thank goodness for Shutterfly!  This site has been my go-to for all things photo the past year.  With getting married, it has been the home for our engagement and wedding photos, and was an excellent place to make a share site where we could send family and friends to get their own.  And now I am going to use it to create our Christmas cards, instead of painstakingly crafting them all by hand.  What's the point in all that work when Shutterfly has the world's most beautiful designs?  Plus, right now, all of their cards are 30% off!


We definitely want to showcase a few of our wedding pictures on our cards.  Which is why I fell in love with this beautiful design. I adore its elegant feel, the larger size of the photos, and the fact that it's a Christmas Card, rather than a "holiday" card.  

I can already see what pictures would go where!  Our second runner up was this pretty one, but we decided that we might have just liked it because there were wedding photos on it...

Shutterfly is a good place to mark some gifts off your "To Buy" list.  They've got great calendars that any grand parent would adore, and awesome photo books too.  My sisters-in-law are the queens of photo books, and they always look fabulous!  Some day, some day....  :)  


Thanks Shutterfly, for being amazing, as always!

Recent Acquisitions

We have had some recent acquisitions of a rather medical nature.  They are very, very cool.  And they make it very, very real that my hubby will soon be Dr. Hubby.  It might seem strange, but at the hubby's med school, they don't need their doctor equipment until their second semester.  They had a "discount" (whoever did the pricing needs to work on their definition of a discount!) sale at the school, so the hubby got everything he'll need to start learning how to examine his patients.  He brought all these goodies home last night, and I got super pumped!

I was most excited for this.  Because I can play with it :)  Under future-doctor supervision, of course!

His Littmann Cardiology III Stethoscope.  I can't wait for him to learn what all those ocean-like sounds actually mean!  

Also from his bag of goodies came his otoscope.  What the heck is that?  The tool that doctors use to look in your ears and eyes and nose and mouth.

(Note that I didn't remove it from the plastic - that is because I saw the price tag.  And immediately decided to stop touching it!).

Finally...the patella hammer, tuning fork, and pen light...because everyone needs their tuning fork handy!

He also bought a blood pressure cuff, but it has to be shipped.  Final price tag?  A lot.  More than my entire Christmas budget.  Plus groceries for a month.  Roughly.  Yeesh....bring on next semester's loan money already!

When men do arts and crafts...

...this is the result!  

(I'm ashamed to publish a picture with the office in such chaos, but it is so funny that I had to!  I took it with my camera phone really late at night, so I'm sure it's terrible - don't enlarge it!)

The hubby's school seems to believe that it's important to "be a person" as well as "be a doctor."  So he got to do this busy work Creative Reflective Project on the doctor/patient relationship and the humanness of physicians.  It could be done using any medium.  When he turned his in, the hubby said there was everything from musical compositions to heart-shaped cakes to drawings.  You can see the bits and pieces of his project scattered all over the floor.

He definitely didn't wait to do it until the night before it was due.  Oh no.  No, if that was the case, it would probably look like a tornado of arts and crafts supplies went through our office. 

Ha :)

Whole Wheat English Muffins

I've decided that when I grow up (ahem!), and have lots of out-of-town friends and relatives staying with us, I'll get up before everyone else, and make these delicious English Muffins.  They are that good, the loss of two hours of sleep would totally be worth it.  

This is a recipe I've tweaked a bit since I started making these.  There's pretty little hands-on time required, but every second of it is completely worth it.  

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Whole Wheat English Muffins

Ingredients:
2 tsp. active dry yeast 
1/2 tsp. sugar
1 cup warm water (divided into halves) 
1/2 cup warm milk
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/3 cups bread flour
2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt


Directions

• Mix together the yeast, sugar, and 1/2 cup warm water in a small bowl.  Whisk together, cover with a towel, and let sit for five minutes.
• Add in remaining 1/2 cup warm water, and 1/2 cup warm milk.  Whisk, cover, and let sit for five additional minutes.

• While it's fermenting, in a large bowl, combine your flours and salt.  Also, grease a medium size bowl. 
• Slowly add in the liquids into the flour mixture and stir until combined. 
• Gently pour out onto a floured surface and knead until smooth (roughly 6-7 minutes).  Place dough into greased bowl.

• Cover the bowl with plastic warp and top with the towel.  Allow to rise in a warm place (on top of the refrigerator or in the oven with the oven light on), for at least 90 minutes, or until doubled (I estimate, ha!).

• On a lightly floured surface, pour out the dough, deflate slightly, and roll it into a rope (an inch or two thick, doesn't need to be precise).  
• Divide the dough into 8-9 equal pieces.  Roll them into balls, and place on a baking sheet.  (I line mine with parchment or wax paper to keep them from sticking).  Place another baking sheet on top of the muffins, and let rise 20 minutes.  
• Set an electric griddle to 300 degrees.  Grease it well, then place each of the disks onto the griddle.  Allow to cook until browned (about 10 minutes), then flip and cook until browned.  
• (This is where I test the internal temperature, because I'm not really a baker, I just pretend to be.  They should have an internal temp. of about 200 degrees.  If you're a little bit short, pop your oven on and bake them another five minutes until they are done through). 
• Cool on a wire rack, or split and eat them all while they're still warm from the griddle! 

Hello!  Isn't your mouth just watering?  They scream out for some yummy pumpkin butter.  They also freeze WONDERFULLY (just be sure to split them in half before freezing!).  I wrap them in plastic wrap, then just slid them into a big freezer bag.  To use, just pop them apart and then into the toaster.   I use these to make the hubby's "McMJ's"  (McMuffins...except by me, MJ...we're so lame!).  Just fry up an egg and a piece of ham, and you have a delicious and nutritious breakfast that can be eaten on the morning commute.    Pin It

Guess who I'm sitting by?

(and by, I mean "sitting by," I really just mean that we are in the same room)...

My husband :)

He's had a crazy week.  From Wednesday until now, I swear the only awake time I had with him was in the morning while getting ready for the day.  Thursday was the worst.  My hubby had class/lectures/labs all day from the normal 8.00-5.15, studied at school for a couple of hours, then shadowed in the ER from 8-midnight.   Normal class-y stuff on Friday, and then I went to the dinner theater (sounds way more classy than it was.  Standard attire included camo and flannel) with my parents and sister.  The hubby passed on the show so he could study.  So we saw each other around 10pm last night. 

While this might be a standard for some Med School Hubby's, mine makes it a serious point that if there is any studying he can do at home, he does it at home.  Does that make me spoiled, that I get to see his handsome face frequently?  100%. 

But the crazy week doesn't matter anymore, because I'm sitting by him now.  And we get to (pretty much) spend all of today together.  Granted, he'll be studying all morning and afternoon, but at least he will be here!  

In a nutshell, this is how every Saturday morning should be spent: together. 

And then we have a family birthday party tonight, which will be great fun + more togetherness.  

This MD School Mrs. is all smiles this morning (even if we did get up on a Saturday when the clock started with a 6 still!)

Travel Map

For my crafty project of the day (that has been laying around in various stages for the past month and is still not technically complete!): Our travel map. 

I hesitate to even post this yet, because right now, it's just "a map," not "a travel map."  

Because a travel map would have pins put in, one color for where I have traveled, one color for where the hubby has traveled, and another color for where our travels have taken us together.  

(but I can't find anywhere to buy just a single color of pushpins!  All I want is plain black and plain white and plain clear...)

This idea is a spin-off of something I saw over on Brittany's Living Life Abundantly Blog  She is a fellow wife of medicine, and I loved what she did with her driftwood mirror!  

I started with these willow branches.  Which I bought.  I paid for sticks.  Officially a city girl.

I had ordered an antique looking map from Amazon for $5, and got a big old sheet of foam board to mount it on.  

I broke all of the branches into different sized pieces, and took them to the garage to spray paint them black (I seriously think our neighbors believe I live in the garage and paint all day!).  I ran out of spraypaint, so they weren't necessarily painted very uniformly, but I can claim we were going for the rustic effect!  When they'd dried, I got out my trusty hot glue gun and started going to town!  The map is 24" x 48" so I had my work cut out for me.  Plus I burned myself.  I literally always burn myself when a hot glue gun is present!

All in all a pretty easy project.  Now just to find the right pushpins to mark off our travels and convince the hubby to take time from studying and hang it in the office somewhere! 

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Things that make me a cool wife

Not to be modest or anything (ahem!)...My hubby's medical school friends think I'm pretty cool.  It's not just the fact that I do his laundry and send him to school with lunches that his friends salivate over.  

It's because, every once in a while, I get my Mr. something super sweet, like his "Halloween Costume," which he wore to school the Friday before Halloween. I saw it at the store and literally fell in love with it.  Stood there giggling excitedly, while people looked at me like I was off my rocker.  As I bought it, I was tempted to tell everyone why it was so perfect.  (I refrained).

But EVERYBODY, students and professors alike, asked him about it...His answer?  "My cool wife got it for me."  (Hence them believing me to be cool!)

Curious what this awesome costume might be?  The super sweetness that he almost refused to wear because he thought it was too nerdy (this coming from a med student.....)?

Tahhh-dah!  Isn't it fabulous?  Totally like one of those "tuxedo" shirts.  I know, I know, not really a costume, and I'm fairly certain that it was just meant to be a regular, everyday shirt (it was definitely on a shelf with other normal shirts).  

The hubby had a seminar he had to be for real dressed up later that day, not costume dressed up, so he put a dress shirt over it.  Afterwards, we were out to dinner with family, and the joy on our nephew's face when his uncle showed him what was under his 'fancy clothes' was PRICELESS.  

And this is what doctors look like during residency.  I assume.  =D