Nutrition is a good class. I'm learning despite having studied it before. I'm looking forward to getting to some more challenging work, though. Chem should give me a run for my money when it comes around... haven't touched that since high school.
Spanish, on the other hand, I dropped. The instructor was good, but a few things came up that made me decide to wait. First, Scott had to miss work two out of my first three days of school, due to sick kids. For a class that is a requirement, such as nutrition, that's fine, but for a class that is only for my personal development, I'm not okay with impacting him like that. He's agreed to be the one to stay home for sick kids when I'm in nursing school, so I don't feel comfortable making him miss work so I can take an extracurricular, no matter how important it is to me in the long run. Second, I realized that I don't see any point in learning Spanish partway but not to a useful level, and I won't have the opportunity to follow up on this semester's class for at least a year, so it doesn't make sense to do this now. Third, I was quickly reminded that I learned French very easily, and Spanish seems to be following suit, so this route may be unnecessarily long and slow. Because of all this, I'm looking for an alternative way to learn. I have my home study program, plus the book from the class that I can't return, but I need a place to speak it. A community based class would be wonderful - a way for me to learn along with others, but be responsible to myself. I feel a little disappointed in myself for dropping a class for the first time, but on the other hand, I actually feel like I'm making a bigger commitment to learning by doing so - if I'd stayed in the class, I think it would have ended up just this one class. Plus, I'm reaffirming the commitment I made to my family when I decided to go (mostly) off call and (mostly) out of school until Donovan goes to school full-time.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
12 hours of motherhood
Interrupted sleep on a small boy's bed. Coughs, sneezes, and snot in my face. A sad boy crying for me. Cuddles and a movie. "I love you, Mommy," countless times.
I wouldn't trade it.
I wouldn't trade it.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Gems 2011
And the slog through the old Facebook posts continues...
January
Stoked and motivated to work my tail off for the next 6 months!!! which is a good thing, cuz I'm gonna hafta.
I did not expect for tears to come simply by passing the freeway exit to my grandpa's house. Dammit.
Dropped our ketubah off at the framing studio. Think I can get it on the wall before our 10 year anniversary?
February
I was browsing au pair profiles even though I still think that's an unlikely route for us, and I think very firmly that the au pair company should have given a somewhat Americanized name to the young woman named "Supaporn."
Welcome to the 21st century: My daughters are using their email addresses to send each other messages like "Poooooooooooooooo". Some things change, and some things don't.
Apparently there's an STD nicknamed Donovanosis. Oh great. Well, at least I didn't name my daughters Chlamydia and Gonorrhea.
Today, Eliana told me she didn't want me anymore. I told her to write a letter requesting reassignment, to the woman she wanted to be her mother now. She wrote it to me. Happy Valentine's Day!
There's nothing in this world like motherhood to leave you stripped to your core, raw and aching. Love hurts.
March
D strips himself naked; Kes picks up her blanket (knit by my grandmother 20 years ago before she died), approaches D: "Are you cold, honey?" Wraps him in the blanket, like wings folding around him, and I think: warm blanket, sister's love, great-grandma's love, truly the wings of the shekhinah.
If I had to pick two words to sum up my last two weeks: bass-ackwards and mind-blowing.
Goodbye Kessa, hello Kesenia! ("Mom, I like Kesenia best now. Please don't call me Kessa anymore. But it's okay if you forget every once in a while.")
More email updates from the front lines of sisterhood: Kesenia is now tattling on Eliana via emails to me while I'm at work.
I spent about 48 hrs wondering why I hadn't finished my MA and taught anthro instead of pursuing the strange world I've brought around myself. Then today I noticed I was studying pap smears, oncogenic HPV strains, and genital lesions, without having planned to do so, while enjoying my nice lunch salad. I think it's all good again.
April
K: "Mom, what does fame mean?"
Me: "It's when everyone knows who that person is. Someone's famous when you know who that person is even though you don't know them. Like Lady Gaga and P!nk."
K: "Oh, I get it, I get it. Waitwaitwait... you mean Lady Gaga and Pink are REAL???"
D stumbles into my room half asleep and blinded by my overhead light: "Nene, Mommy?" "Nope, it's sleep time." "Read a book to me, Mommy?" "Nope, it's sleep time." "Sleep to me, Mommy?" Who could resist? Precious fleeting moments feeling him drift off while still clutching me around the neck. My empty nest may be 16 years off, but I can see it.
Eliana, 7: "I don't like Jewish school because of all the stories that I just don't believe in! All that stuff can't have really happened, Mom. It's not real."
I literally almost fell over, mostly b/c I was laughing so hard at how awesome she is.
10 points if you can guess what I said back.
May
I think it's a good solid sign you're sleep deprived when you get the urge to do jazz hands because you have gloves on... latex-free non-sterile medical gloves.
"Hello, I will not come out until you let me out today and I mean it. Nowone will see me again until you do it. (exept for special acations of corse) Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Sorry. I can not say that sentence. The world is selfish and cruel. Goodbye forever until you let me out. PS. Go Away! P.S.S. Let Me Out! Eliana"
D might just win cutest "I love you": "Ah wuh loo."
Eliana's watching The Princess Bride for the first time tonight! A momentous occasion deserving Dad and Mom all to herself, popcorn, M&M's, and a late bedtime.
My dad says, "Why couldn't you have done something easy for a living? Like be a lawyer."
When Eliana was 4 she chased down, picked up, and got bitten by a jumping spider. Precocious D has checked this off his bucket list at 2.5.
I LOVE the body God gave me! Now the body the kids gave me, I'm less enamored with. ;)
June
Still have no idea why there was a helicopter circling above for over 15 minutes at 1am last night... with no searchlight on or anything. But I do have an update on the situation, via Donovan: "Helicoppy no get us. Wiwwow clode."
My iPhone can fill in "birthiversary" and "birthgivingday" for me, guesses lots of crazy and wrong words after I've input one or two letters, but won't fill in the last two letters of "schedule", "breakfast", or "weekend"! ?
Scott has a coworker named Yoga Kippur. This makes the JewBu in me very happy.
Donovan: "Gitcher own, LaLa. Gitcher own." Once again, hard to feel sorry for Eliana when it comes straight from her own mouth...
July
Chocolate cupcake with lime frosting. Who knew?
With the glaring exception of homophobia, I am so impressed with the values and priorities of this Mormon community. The rest of the US could use a dose of this sensibility.
Dizzy, temperature sensitive, constant internal monologue, achy, and nauseous. 2 points each = a 10 on my sleep deprivation Apgar scale.
Time has no meaning. I've had three naps in the past 24 hrs. We won't talk about what came before then... I can't remember! Trying now to get a good 6 hour chunk or longer... wish me luck!
OMG, 2 nights of sleep? What kind of parallel universe is this? Ahhhhhh.
It's Saturday, no one's in labor, I don't have clinic, I don't have my kids with me, and my body wakes me up at 6:30???
Dear ginger chews, you are quite hot and spicy enough to keep me awake while driving at 4 am just the way you are. There is no need to try to go down the wrong pipe. Please refrain in the future.
Trunky: LDS slang referring to a missionary's homesickness/burnout toward the end of the mission. Applied to me by my supervisor on my last day of my midwifery internship in UT, with the implication that I had earned it.
August
I just got a FB friend request from Willma Dickfit.
2001: "When Hell freezes over will I pay tuition for my children's elementary education, especially not in a school centered around one religion or culture."
2011: "Hey Lucifer... it cold down there?"
My husband is at a "work conference." And by that, I mean he's at a Metallica concert.
September
I sent all the paperwork from my Utah internship to my midwifery school today. The package weighed almost two pounds. It may have looked like paper, on the outside, but once in the envelope I could have sworn the contents were two pounds of my blood, sweat, and tears, and three weeks of my breath.
2 years and 2 days after my first birth with my Nova ladies, I got to catch my 25th baby as official primary under supervision and attend my 74th official birth as a midwifery student. (Unofficially, 27 catches and 88 births as student, and I have no idea how many doula births.) This boggles.
E: "I feel like running away from home."
Me: "Where are you going to go?"
E: "I'll wait on the sidewalk for someone to call the police and then the police can take me to Grandma's house. But first I need a rope."
Me: "What's the rope for?"
E: "To climb out the window down to the street."
Me: "We do have stairs..."
D: "Tekiyah!" (blows toy shofar) "Teriyaki!" (blows toy shofar)
You know your 3 year old had a great birthday when bedtime results in a record-breaking meltdown followed by sudden silence.
October
Sometimes Kesenia says something that sounds exactly like my Grandma Anne. I know she's got a bunch of her genes just by looking at her, but it's still uncanny when the same phrasing and inflection comes out of her mouth. How does my 6 year old Californian sound like a 90 year old New York Jew?
Watching Donovan try to remove his temporary tattoos.
Dear God, when I named my firstborn "God has answered me," I guess I jumped the gun a little. I apologize for being presumptuous. 8 years later... Please may I have some answers for parenting her? Or one? Or just a clue? Humbly, Me.
So... that vacation I thought I took 6 months ago? It was in 2010, not 2011. I don't know what that means.
I woke up to find my eldest and my father playing poker at the kitchen table.
D: "Mommy, me play a big, scawy song on the pano. It go BOMBOMBOM."
November
I walked out of my (old) house for the last time today. Goodbye Chapman Way.
"Donovan, you can wear clothes or pajamas when you're sick. What do you want to wear today?"
"Me wanna wear naked."
Sweet, sweet Eliana is cuddling a double ear infection-ed boy to sleep. Beautiful.
Now he's delegating:
Me: "Donovan, can I have a snuggle?"
D: "Kessa, can you go snuggle Mama?"
December
I haven't figured out how to drink wine with glasses on. I keep bumping the glass into my glasses as I try to finish off the last sips. I'm sure the fact that I'm tipsy by the end of one glass is not helping.
Donovan keeps showing off his new vocabulary word, "directions," by using it as often as possible. Fortunately for my sick sense of humor, he can't pronounce it correctly. He leaves off the D... so we're having lots of inadvertent conversations about erections.
January
Stoked and motivated to work my tail off for the next 6 months!!! which is a good thing, cuz I'm gonna hafta.
I did not expect for tears to come simply by passing the freeway exit to my grandpa's house. Dammit.
Dropped our ketubah off at the framing studio. Think I can get it on the wall before our 10 year anniversary?
February
I was browsing au pair profiles even though I still think that's an unlikely route for us, and I think very firmly that the au pair company should have given a somewhat Americanized name to the young woman named "Supaporn."
Welcome to the 21st century: My daughters are using their email addresses to send each other messages like "Poooooooooooooooo". Some things change, and some things don't.
Apparently there's an STD nicknamed Donovanosis. Oh great. Well, at least I didn't name my daughters Chlamydia and Gonorrhea.
Today, Eliana told me she didn't want me anymore. I told her to write a letter requesting reassignment, to the woman she wanted to be her mother now. She wrote it to me. Happy Valentine's Day!
There's nothing in this world like motherhood to leave you stripped to your core, raw and aching. Love hurts.
March
D strips himself naked; Kes picks up her blanket (knit by my grandmother 20 years ago before she died), approaches D: "Are you cold, honey?" Wraps him in the blanket, like wings folding around him, and I think: warm blanket, sister's love, great-grandma's love, truly the wings of the shekhinah.
If I had to pick two words to sum up my last two weeks: bass-ackwards and mind-blowing.
Goodbye Kessa, hello Kesenia! ("Mom, I like Kesenia best now. Please don't call me Kessa anymore. But it's okay if you forget every once in a while.")
More email updates from the front lines of sisterhood: Kesenia is now tattling on Eliana via emails to me while I'm at work.
I spent about 48 hrs wondering why I hadn't finished my MA and taught anthro instead of pursuing the strange world I've brought around myself. Then today I noticed I was studying pap smears, oncogenic HPV strains, and genital lesions, without having planned to do so, while enjoying my nice lunch salad. I think it's all good again.
April
K: "Mom, what does fame mean?"
Me: "It's when everyone knows who that person is. Someone's famous when you know who that person is even though you don't know them. Like Lady Gaga and P!nk."
K: "Oh, I get it, I get it. Waitwaitwait... you mean Lady Gaga and Pink are REAL???"
D stumbles into my room half asleep and blinded by my overhead light: "Nene, Mommy?" "Nope, it's sleep time." "Read a book to me, Mommy?" "Nope, it's sleep time." "Sleep to me, Mommy?" Who could resist? Precious fleeting moments feeling him drift off while still clutching me around the neck. My empty nest may be 16 years off, but I can see it.
Eliana, 7: "I don't like Jewish school because of all the stories that I just don't believe in! All that stuff can't have really happened, Mom. It's not real."
I literally almost fell over, mostly b/c I was laughing so hard at how awesome she is.
10 points if you can guess what I said back.
May
I think it's a good solid sign you're sleep deprived when you get the urge to do jazz hands because you have gloves on... latex-free non-sterile medical gloves.
"Hello, I will not come out until you let me out today and I mean it. Nowone will see me again until you do it. (exept for special acations of corse) Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Sorry. I can not say that sentence. The world is selfish and cruel. Goodbye forever until you let me out. PS. Go Away! P.S.S. Let Me Out! Eliana"
D might just win cutest "I love you": "Ah wuh loo."
Eliana's watching The Princess Bride for the first time tonight! A momentous occasion deserving Dad and Mom all to herself, popcorn, M&M's, and a late bedtime.
My dad says, "Why couldn't you have done something easy for a living? Like be a lawyer."
When Eliana was 4 she chased down, picked up, and got bitten by a jumping spider. Precocious D has checked this off his bucket list at 2.5.
I LOVE the body God gave me! Now the body the kids gave me, I'm less enamored with. ;)
June
Still have no idea why there was a helicopter circling above for over 15 minutes at 1am last night... with no searchlight on or anything. But I do have an update on the situation, via Donovan: "Helicoppy no get us. Wiwwow clode."
My iPhone can fill in "birthiversary" and "birthgivingday" for me, guesses lots of crazy and wrong words after I've input one or two letters, but won't fill in the last two letters of "schedule", "breakfast", or "weekend"! ?
Scott has a coworker named Yoga Kippur. This makes the JewBu in me very happy.
Donovan: "Gitcher own, LaLa. Gitcher own." Once again, hard to feel sorry for Eliana when it comes straight from her own mouth...
July
Chocolate cupcake with lime frosting. Who knew?
With the glaring exception of homophobia, I am so impressed with the values and priorities of this Mormon community. The rest of the US could use a dose of this sensibility.
Dizzy, temperature sensitive, constant internal monologue, achy, and nauseous. 2 points each = a 10 on my sleep deprivation Apgar scale.
Time has no meaning. I've had three naps in the past 24 hrs. We won't talk about what came before then... I can't remember! Trying now to get a good 6 hour chunk or longer... wish me luck!
OMG, 2 nights of sleep? What kind of parallel universe is this? Ahhhhhh.
It's Saturday, no one's in labor, I don't have clinic, I don't have my kids with me, and my body wakes me up at 6:30???
Dear ginger chews, you are quite hot and spicy enough to keep me awake while driving at 4 am just the way you are. There is no need to try to go down the wrong pipe. Please refrain in the future.
Trunky: LDS slang referring to a missionary's homesickness/burnout toward the end of the mission. Applied to me by my supervisor on my last day of my midwifery internship in UT, with the implication that I had earned it.
August
I just got a FB friend request from Willma Dickfit.
2001: "When Hell freezes over will I pay tuition for my children's elementary education, especially not in a school centered around one religion or culture."
2011: "Hey Lucifer... it cold down there?"
My husband is at a "work conference." And by that, I mean he's at a Metallica concert.
September
I sent all the paperwork from my Utah internship to my midwifery school today. The package weighed almost two pounds. It may have looked like paper, on the outside, but once in the envelope I could have sworn the contents were two pounds of my blood, sweat, and tears, and three weeks of my breath.
2 years and 2 days after my first birth with my Nova ladies, I got to catch my 25th baby as official primary under supervision and attend my 74th official birth as a midwifery student. (Unofficially, 27 catches and 88 births as student, and I have no idea how many doula births.) This boggles.
E: "I feel like running away from home."
Me: "Where are you going to go?"
E: "I'll wait on the sidewalk for someone to call the police and then the police can take me to Grandma's house. But first I need a rope."
Me: "What's the rope for?"
E: "To climb out the window down to the street."
Me: "We do have stairs..."
D: "Tekiyah!" (blows toy shofar) "Teriyaki!" (blows toy shofar)
You know your 3 year old had a great birthday when bedtime results in a record-breaking meltdown followed by sudden silence.
October
Sometimes Kesenia says something that sounds exactly like my Grandma Anne. I know she's got a bunch of her genes just by looking at her, but it's still uncanny when the same phrasing and inflection comes out of her mouth. How does my 6 year old Californian sound like a 90 year old New York Jew?
Watching Donovan try to remove his temporary tattoos.
Dear God, when I named my firstborn "God has answered me," I guess I jumped the gun a little. I apologize for being presumptuous. 8 years later... Please may I have some answers for parenting her? Or one? Or just a clue? Humbly, Me.
So... that vacation I thought I took 6 months ago? It was in 2010, not 2011. I don't know what that means.
I woke up to find my eldest and my father playing poker at the kitchen table.
D: "Mommy, me play a big, scawy song on the pano. It go BOMBOMBOM."
November
I walked out of my (old) house for the last time today. Goodbye Chapman Way.
"Donovan, you can wear clothes or pajamas when you're sick. What do you want to wear today?"
"Me wanna wear naked."
Sweet, sweet Eliana is cuddling a double ear infection-ed boy to sleep. Beautiful.
Now he's delegating:
Me: "Donovan, can I have a snuggle?"
D: "Kessa, can you go snuggle Mama?"
December
I haven't figured out how to drink wine with glasses on. I keep bumping the glass into my glasses as I try to finish off the last sips. I'm sure the fact that I'm tipsy by the end of one glass is not helping.
Donovan keeps showing off his new vocabulary word, "directions," by using it as often as possible. Fortunately for my sick sense of humor, he can't pronounce it correctly. He leaves off the D... so we're having lots of inadvertent conversations about erections.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Ramblings on college
First day at community college today! I'm enrolled in Nutrition and Spanish. Nutrition is one of the prerequisites for all the nursing programs I'm interested in, and Spanish is for fun. Well, I suppose it's actually more important than that, because learning Spanish has been one of my back-burner personal goals since I moved to LA for college 15 years ago, so it's nice to finally take it from queued up to cued up!
Speaking of that glorious age gap between college age and my age... I sat down in Spanish class and the woman next to me turned to me and said, "How old are you?" Now, this question isn't something people generally ask, certainly not right off the bat, so I made a split second decision to give her the benefit of the doubt and answered, "Thirty-three." She said, "Oh wow, I thought you were in your twenties. I'm eighteen, and I think I'm the youngest one in here." I said, "Nah, I'm sure there are lots of people right out of high school here," (although the truth is, anyone under 25 looks like 18 to me anymore) and thought, yep, I was right to give her the benefit of the doubt. It's still not the most polite question, perhaps, but she was feeling intimidated, and apparently didn't think I was old enough to have reached the point where it was inappropriate to ask, so I'll cut her some slack. I had actually just been walking around the campus noting how young everyone looked (and the fact that I'm almost twice as old as many of them), so I related to her feeling of being on the sides of the age spectrum.
It was also the second time in the past week that my age has come up with someone I didn't really know. The other time was when a mother of young children asked me if Donovan was my only child, and I replied that I have nine and seven year old girls. She said, "Oh, you look too young to have a nine year old!" To which I replied a thank you and that I was young when she was born. I can't remember whether she asked my age or not.
Right, my classes...
Both professors are energetic and engaging, thank heavens. The Spanish professor is going to do a full immersion course, which absolutely thrills me. I know that's what I need. She did half the class time in Spanish today, and won't speak in English again unless she absolutely has to, and I was pretty impressed by her ability to teach Spanish using only Spanish. She says her semester class is worth about 3 years of high school Spanish, so I say bring it on. I've been waiting a long time for this!
It's very strange to be back in school in the age of computers. I walked in to Nutrition, and the screen had a webpage projected onto it so that the professor could show us how to log in to the course website to do our homework. I feel like I ought to become a member of AARP when I talk about what the technology was like when I went to college, and I only graduated 12 years ago. (I called home from orientation on a pay phone. In my defense, it had push buttons, not a rotor.) We had email and signed up for classes via the internet starting my second or third quarter. But no professors used power point yet, there was no such thing as an online course, and submitting coursework via email attachment is something I did once when I was sick and the instructor took pity on me.
It's also strange to have the background I do. Most of the people there have recently graduated high school. Some others have spent time working after high school. This is what we expect from college students. So, when my Nutrition professor asked us to give a short intro and tell her why we were taking her class, and all the other students were talking about where they worked and what their major was, I'm thinking, "Hi, I'm Megan, I'm a mom and a midwife, and I don't have a major here because I already have a bachelor's from UCLA, but this is one of the prerequisites I'm taking so I can get a nursing degree to become a midwife... yes I know I'm already a midwife... it's complicated." So I just said, "Hi, I'm Megan, I'm undeclared and am taking prerequisites for an accelerated bachelor's in nursing," so that I wouldn't sound braggy but giving the instructor the chance to gather that it's a second degree if she knows about ABSN programs. The strange part to me is balancing being open and honest about who I am and where I come from, without making anyone feel that I think I'm better than they are.
In truth, I think we're on completely equal footing. I've never taken these classes before. At UCLA, I avoided science classes like the plague. My physical science courses were in Environmental Science. My biological science course was Anatomy and Physiology for non-science majors, no lab component, and I took it pass/no pass! I was going to be an elementary school teacher, so I majored in the subject I enjoyed most. I never would have believed you if you had told me I'd be a midwife someday. If I'd had any inkling, you can bet I would have worked my tail off to get into UCLA's nursing school.
Hindsight.
It's going to be a grand adventure. Even if I end up deciding to stick with being a licensed midwife working in home birth, rather than going back to school to be a nurse-midwife so that I can work in any setting, I'm excited to be exercising my brain while the kids are in school, and learning new things. This semester in particular is exciting since these topics will be applicable to my life in general, not just to my potential career path.
I'll check in with updates. Hopefully not all of them will be about speaking Frespañol. ("Escucho la radio tous les jours." Yeah.)
Speaking of that glorious age gap between college age and my age... I sat down in Spanish class and the woman next to me turned to me and said, "How old are you?" Now, this question isn't something people generally ask, certainly not right off the bat, so I made a split second decision to give her the benefit of the doubt and answered, "Thirty-three." She said, "Oh wow, I thought you were in your twenties. I'm eighteen, and I think I'm the youngest one in here." I said, "Nah, I'm sure there are lots of people right out of high school here," (although the truth is, anyone under 25 looks like 18 to me anymore) and thought, yep, I was right to give her the benefit of the doubt. It's still not the most polite question, perhaps, but she was feeling intimidated, and apparently didn't think I was old enough to have reached the point where it was inappropriate to ask, so I'll cut her some slack. I had actually just been walking around the campus noting how young everyone looked (and the fact that I'm almost twice as old as many of them), so I related to her feeling of being on the sides of the age spectrum.
It was also the second time in the past week that my age has come up with someone I didn't really know. The other time was when a mother of young children asked me if Donovan was my only child, and I replied that I have nine and seven year old girls. She said, "Oh, you look too young to have a nine year old!" To which I replied a thank you and that I was young when she was born. I can't remember whether she asked my age or not.
Right, my classes...
Both professors are energetic and engaging, thank heavens. The Spanish professor is going to do a full immersion course, which absolutely thrills me. I know that's what I need. She did half the class time in Spanish today, and won't speak in English again unless she absolutely has to, and I was pretty impressed by her ability to teach Spanish using only Spanish. She says her semester class is worth about 3 years of high school Spanish, so I say bring it on. I've been waiting a long time for this!
It's very strange to be back in school in the age of computers. I walked in to Nutrition, and the screen had a webpage projected onto it so that the professor could show us how to log in to the course website to do our homework. I feel like I ought to become a member of AARP when I talk about what the technology was like when I went to college, and I only graduated 12 years ago. (I called home from orientation on a pay phone. In my defense, it had push buttons, not a rotor.) We had email and signed up for classes via the internet starting my second or third quarter. But no professors used power point yet, there was no such thing as an online course, and submitting coursework via email attachment is something I did once when I was sick and the instructor took pity on me.
It's also strange to have the background I do. Most of the people there have recently graduated high school. Some others have spent time working after high school. This is what we expect from college students. So, when my Nutrition professor asked us to give a short intro and tell her why we were taking her class, and all the other students were talking about where they worked and what their major was, I'm thinking, "Hi, I'm Megan, I'm a mom and a midwife, and I don't have a major here because I already have a bachelor's from UCLA, but this is one of the prerequisites I'm taking so I can get a nursing degree to become a midwife... yes I know I'm already a midwife... it's complicated." So I just said, "Hi, I'm Megan, I'm undeclared and am taking prerequisites for an accelerated bachelor's in nursing," so that I wouldn't sound braggy but giving the instructor the chance to gather that it's a second degree if she knows about ABSN programs. The strange part to me is balancing being open and honest about who I am and where I come from, without making anyone feel that I think I'm better than they are.
In truth, I think we're on completely equal footing. I've never taken these classes before. At UCLA, I avoided science classes like the plague. My physical science courses were in Environmental Science. My biological science course was Anatomy and Physiology for non-science majors, no lab component, and I took it pass/no pass! I was going to be an elementary school teacher, so I majored in the subject I enjoyed most. I never would have believed you if you had told me I'd be a midwife someday. If I'd had any inkling, you can bet I would have worked my tail off to get into UCLA's nursing school.
Hindsight.
It's going to be a grand adventure. Even if I end up deciding to stick with being a licensed midwife working in home birth, rather than going back to school to be a nurse-midwife so that I can work in any setting, I'm excited to be exercising my brain while the kids are in school, and learning new things. This semester in particular is exciting since these topics will be applicable to my life in general, not just to my potential career path.
I'll check in with updates. Hopefully not all of them will be about speaking Frespañol. ("Escucho la radio tous les jours." Yeah.)
Saturday, January 12, 2013
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