All you need to do to pass any of the three steps of the United States Medical Licensing Exam is put on a charming smile and say, “Trust me, I’m a doctor.” The correct answers will then quickly blink so that you may select them and quickly finish your exam.
Archive for » 2010 «
02
September
We have 2 sitters “hired.” We’ve interviewed them, let Riley meet them, and explained all our needs/wants/schedules to them and they are on board. It’s nice having two people that we feel we can trust a phone call or text message away. We might just go out on a date on Sunday to celebrate. For those who need a babysitter, I highly recommend SitterCity.com. There are thousands and thousands of listings of qualified (and plenty of not-so-qualified) babysitters of all ages and demographics. I had 45 people apply, which gave me incredible freedom in being selective about who would watch Riley, and I’m very happy with the results.
Between now and Saturday night, it’s all studying all the time, but after that, Andy’s free and it might be time to relax a bit. For those who don’t know, he’s taking the second part of the Step 2, the clinical knowledge portion, on Saturday. Yet another 9 hour test. But at least he’ll be free from test taking for a while at that point… until it’s time for the Step 3. Ahhh the joys of med school. On the plus side, he’s finished all his cores and is now on his electives. In about 27 weeks, he will officially be Dr. Andy. The end is finally near…
Riley has been making leaps and bounds, as usual. He now eats chewable food at every meal and feeds it to himself without much intervention from us. He’s not perfect at it, but he’s learning and improving with every meal. He FINALLY cut his first tooth yesterday after weeks and weeks of protruding and receding. His left lower central incisor has broken free! He’s also a crawling machine and needs to be watched much more closely than before. He is so active – that’s another reason we needed the babysitters. He is too smart and too mobile to be left to his own devices anymore. We let him crawl around the living room a few days ago and suddenly he was in the kitchen. He covered a lot of ground much faster than we expected him to, so I’ll probably spend some time this weekend finalizing our baby-proofing. Time flies…
Category: Atlanta Life
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28
August
I’ve decided that Riley is now old enough for a babysitter. It was a difficult decision to come to because I still don’t love the idea of leaving him, but occasionally I have work business that warrants serious focus and every now and then it would be nice to go on a date with Andy without the baby. I signed up on a web site that has tons and tons of sitters listed with background checks, experience, biographies, and more. You would be surprised at how qualified some of these babysitters are - masters degrees in child development, graduate work in counseling, years of service as nannies, etc. There are filters to add different critieria which I have found invaluable. For example, some of the things I found to be non-negotiable were non-smoking, okay with pets, experience with infants, at least some college coursework, first aid and CPR certifications, and speaking another language is a bonus. Call me sexist, but I also am only interested in female babysitters. In the Atlanta area, that still gives me several hundred people from which to choose. So far there are about 35 applicants to the job I posted and I have two favorites that are standing out above the crowd. It’s going to be a difficult decision, but it’s an important one. I only want to have one babysitter for Riley so he has someone he’s comfortable with and that we know well and can trust implicitly. I’m going to wait a few more days and let the job applications keep rolling in and then by the end of the weekend, I’ll go back over and start setting up interviews. I have to admit, it is a little bit of a power trip and a nice change of pace being on this end of the hiring process!
Category: Atlanta Life
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27
August
After a round trip to Knoxville and a day of work in the office and training in just over 24 hours, I’m quite exhausted so this will be brief. However, Riley started making a few strides which deserved recognition. For the first time last night and to a greater degree today, Riley fed himself. He has started grabbing his baby banana snacks with his fingers and putting them in his mouth, chewing them, and begging for more. Now, he is not always successful in the self-feeding and if you don’t hand it to him he is frequently UNsuccessful, but he can do it. He’s better at using his left hand which gives me a vague hope that he will be left handed (lefties are just smarter in general and I say this without the hint of bias, hehe). It was a big step to see him put together grabbing, feeding, chewing, and swallowing, without needing our help much at all.
We arrived Thursday night in time for dinner with my best friend (and Riley’s godmother) Erin and her husband Taylor. We ate at a Japanese place we loved when we lived in Knoxville called Wasabi, which Andy and I agree is our favorite Japanese steakhouse. Riley showed off literally the whole meal, trying to stand up in his high chair, eat his own food, and drink from his sippy cup, in between giggles and smiles at Erin and Taylor, but mostly Erin who he seems to adore. When we went back the their house, he was crawling on the floor with more success than I’d ever seen him make and worked out a system for making it about 5 feet in only a few seconds (which he’s never done here). It was really exciting to see him leap forward so quickly.
Today, I was in the office all day, which left Andy with the baby. He didn’t get as much studying done as he wanted, but I’m glad he had the experience of taking the baby by himself for about six hours. Most dads don’t get that much quality time with their children sans mommy. It wasn’t as hard for me as I thought it would be, though I will be glad to be working at home Monday morning. I forgot how hard it was to deal with getting ready for work in the mornings, dress up, and drive to the office. I have a renewed appreciation for my two-flights-of-stairs commute. Despite all that, it was great to be in the office, meet some of my bosses, and touch base with the rest of my team. All in all, a good visit. Now we’re home, sleepy and ready for bed (with the baby already sound asleep).
Category: Life
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26
August
I’m currently serving as my wife’s companion on her business trip to Knoxville, a town I lived in for several years during college. Here are some myths you might not know about this infamous town.
The iconic Knoxville Sunsphere is not actually a spacecraft. It was commissioned by the local Scottish Rite temple on 16th Street for the World’s Fair to idolize the sun, one of this secretive societies most ancient and honored symbols, and thereby to serve as a reminder that they still control the world.
The University of Tennessee body farm, which is world reknowned for its research in decomposition, contains the bodies of several celebrities who have dedicated themselves to science: including Ricky Schroeder, Sinbad, and the real Tom Cruise, whose persona was hijacked by aliens years ago following his death.
The widening project of a 5 mile stretch of I-24/75 from West Town Mall to the University of Tennessee campus took a record 15 years to complete. No other road improvement project in America has required that many years per mile to complete without being abandoned indefinitely.
The total population of Knoxville drops to a mere 10,000 during the summer months, when the University of Tennessee campus is on summer break. This population drought causes a yearly economic crisis that business owners on Cumberland Pike still fail to foresee to this day.
The University of Tennessee prides themselves for having the most alcohol consumed per student of any dry campus nationwide.
That concludes this Knoxville-inspired myth marathon. Hopefully my lengthy homage to the cultural mecca of East Tennessee will give me good Karma towards securing a residency here!
Category: Mythstarters
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24
August
Three years ago today I started writing this blog. Thinking back over the last few years, it’s almost impossible to remember how different life was in 2007. We had just arrived in Dominica, wide eyed and overwhelmed, ready to embark upon this med school saga. So much has changed since that fateful August day. We have lived in a bungalow in the Caribbean, a high rise condo in Miami, in Andy’s childhood bedroom, in an apartment in Maryland, and in a townhouse in Atlanta. Free time went from consisting of a day of sailing to Secret Beach to family day at the aquarium. We have taken vacations to Antigua, Barbados, Puerto Rico, Lake Michigan, San Francisco, Disney World, and Shenandoah National Park. We have bought (and then wrecked) a new car. Most importantly of all, two have become three. It’s funny to take a look at those initial blog posts and reminisce over how different life was then. Andy summarized the first blog post below.
Andy’s Thoughts on the First Day on the Island:
A look back… Today marks 3 years to the day since this blog was started. It has been re-purposed several times over already, renamed at least 3 or 4 times, and yet still remains a significant means for updates. It has seen us through 16 very trying months of our lives isolated from the rest of the world on what most would consider to be a poor island nation. To bring things around full circle, Courtney is currently covered in mosquito bites from recent battles with the Georgia version of these pests. We have endured changes in location, changes in friendships, and the biggest kind of family change: an addition. I am only months away from completing my medical education which began concomitantly with this blog. Courtney was blessed with a stable and successful career on this journey as well. In three years, our lives have changed drastically, and the experiences that engineered this change have also changed who we are intrinsically. So therefore it seems fitting at this time to look back and comment on this post from today’s perspective, a culmination of all the knowledge and experiences gain over the past three years.
“Welcome to the Caribbean, where days linger on – teaching you to enjoy every minute of your time here. Hours ebb and flow with the tides as days wash into evenings and evenings wash into nights.”
This rings especially true since my memories of our time on the island seem to all blend together.
“so proper manners take precedence over a need to rush, rush, rush or a need for personal gain.”
Yet as I recall now, a great number of the locals were out for personal gain, and they were not above cheating or lying to your face to make an extra buck. Though there were the occasional few who were very generous, hard-working, and good-hearted.
“In our front and back yards, there are fruit trees, with everything from coconuts to oranges to bananas to starfruit. We picked a few things to start us off, but let’s just say I’m thrilled to have a huge banana tree weighed down by green bananas behind my house. Sadly, they really aren’t ripe yet – even by my standards.”
I don’t think we hardly ever got to enjoy the myriad of fruit growing about the cottage. The oranges, which never turned orange, were difficult to gage when they were ripe. The bananas would be plucked from the trees just before they ripened, either by the landlord (which of course was to be expected) or by some trespassing asshole local (see above).
“For example, we do not have one of those toilet paper rolls on the wall – it just has to sit either next to or on top of the toilet and you have to unwind it yourself.”
After 16 months of this you really miss something as simple as a toilet paper holder. I honestly can’t say I ever got used to the absence of small household “conveniences” like that.
“Also, central air. We only have A/C units in our bedrooms, plus ceiling fans in them and in the living room. Meaning that our closet and our bathroom can get pretty steamy. We’re still trying to figure out the optimal way to cool our place while keeping electricity costs low. The other big weird thing is power. We have to really conserve electricity because you pay based on usage and apparently it can be quite costly, especially with transformers to transform the voltage.”
If there were one thing I could have changed about our life on the island, it would have been this. Electricity costs comparable to US rates to allow us to run A/C 24/7. That would mean needing those damned vents in the ceiling sealed up, but that would have been just fine with me. The sounds of the jungle pouring through them were at times charming, but usually just a means to violate our privacy and a constant reminder that we didn’t live in a “normal” house.
“We’re a little on the far side from campus (10-15 minutes) but since Andy will probably get a bike, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
Never got a freaking bike. Would have been useful, though that hill leading up to our place might have been a beast.
“My goals for the next 16 months are to write as much as possible, take as many pictures as possible, rest, workout, and experience things I never would not normally have had the opportunity to under other circumstances.”
At least you met all your goals, babe.
“It really is a different world down here and it will completely change the way we view our world!”
Understatement of the decade.
Well that concludes my homage to our first days on Dominica, three years after the fact. Happy Birthday, blog!
Category: Atlanta Life, Island Life
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23
August
In honor of Tyler’s return to blogging, I have been inspired to create my own “grinds my gears” post. It’s late and I’m tired, so I don’t have much, but here goes.
Things that grind my gears:
- People who think they know more than they do. I have a client right now who owns a franchised location of a larger company. He’s advertising with our agency and just called up his salesperson, telling her that we did a bad job creating his campaign and that he can do a better job, threatening to pull his business if we didn’t make the ad copy exactly what he wanted. Even though he’s a small-time advertiser, we don’t like to burn bridges so I agreed to make the changes knowing full well that what he wanted to do wouldn’t work. Sure enough, Google disapproved EVERY SINGLE ONE of his ads because of trademark violations (remember, he owns only one small-time franchised location of a larger company). So now my “bad ad copy” is being put back because if we don’t use mine, Google won’t even run the ad. I know most people don’t know what I do, or probably even care so this anecdote may not even make sense, but suffice it so say, it really grinds my gears when people act like they’re specialists in something they don’t know the first thing about.
- Large groups that camp out at Starbucks for business meetings. Seriously, if there are more than 3 of you, you need to find a larger venue. Starbucks is a coffee shop – it’s a great place for hanging out with a friend or two, a great place for having a small business meeting or interview over coffee, and a great place for studying. But if there are six of you tying up all the laptop plugs, all the chairs and shooting the breeze for hours on end you need to find a different locale. Try an office or your house or a conference room. Chairs and plugs are few and far between at Starbucks and it isn’t fair for six people to host a business meeting that takes up half the seating!
- Riley teething. He’s so tough and hardly ever fusses about it, but you can tell his mouth is really bothering him at times.
- How much fur the cats shed. I feel like I’m always sweeping, mopping, or vacuuming.
- Mosquitoes. If this keeps up, I’m moving back to California where this was never a problem. I have bites all over me right now.
Things that don’t grind my gears:
- How much Riley is learning and doing every day. We were playing together Saturday morning and he turned around from his toy and gave me a big hug, something he’d never done before. My heart melted and it was just about the best moment of my life. Later that day, he gave Andy a big hug as he took him upstairs so he was able to experience the awesomeness of baby hugs.
- Travel Channel. I love Samantha Brown, that’s all I can say.
- Finally getting Riley back on schedule. Because he’s going to bed at 8:45 now and his schedule has regulated after all the time changes, visitors, traveling, and teething that the first half of August entailed, I have time to read and exercise at the end of the day now. Maybe those last few pounds will finally come off and my jeans will look good again. It really grinds my gears that so many of the people I know who had babies around the same time as me have lost all the baby weight; I constantly have to remind myself that they don’t work 40+ hour weeks and thus have ton more time to exercise, go walking, etc.
- Seeing my best friend on Thursday! Riley loves his godmother so I know he’s just as excited as I am.
- My new rice cooker. I made chicken, green beans, and brown rice in it the other day and it felt so weird having all this free time to play with the baby, straighten the house, and relax as the rice cooker cooked everything for me. It was a beautiful thing. It does also make rice, which is pretty cool.
And that, my friends, is what does and does not grind my gears.
Category: Stuff Herdas Like
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23
August
One of the many dubious ingredients in the famous Twinkie is a lead salt. This not only serves to prolong the shelf life of the saturated fat laden snack, but is also the secret behind their well-publicized ability to survive nuclear fallout. Oddly enough, this ingredient is considered one of the least harmful contained in the snack cake.
Credit for the inspiration behind this myth goes to my good buddy, Andrew Deane who will be tying the knot in September! Congrats Andrew!
Category: Mythstarters
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20
August
As you can tell, Andy actually posted on the blog for the first time in many many many months. It’s nice to see a little activity as I’ve been going through a serious slump in my writing lately, a slump characterized by complete and total mediocrity. It’s easy to blame this writer’s block on a lack of interesting moments in our lives right now, even though our days are filled with Riley’s milestones and freakishly ahead-of-the-curve antics. But part of me hesitates to write about it even as I’m bursting with parental pride because it seems braggadocious, immodest, and more than a little shallow. When my time isn’t occupied with the baby, I’m working and working hard, but the status of my marketing campaigns is hardly the stuff of captivating blog posts. That leaves me with little else in my life of consequence as the full-time jobs of mom and marketing analyst leave little room for much else. Frankly, most days I’d rather use my free time taking a shower or sleeping than blogging. But perhaps some new post categories (like Andy’s MythStarters column) and some new bloggers on the blogroll will revitalize the site.
For those uninterested in reading about the baby, skip to the next paragraph.
As it is essential for all the grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other family members who do read the blog, I must give an update on how Riley’s doing. He’s just over six months old now and according to his pediatrician, quite a bit ahead of the curve. He is fairly mobile and can crawl-ish. His form isn’t pretty but he gets around pretty well. He sits up by himself for several minutes at a time and even longer if he has something to grab onto either in front of or behind him. He claps, laughs, smiles, and plays constantly. He entertains himself really well, preferring cell phones, remotes, blocks, and now measuring cups I have gifted him. He has his first two teeth just about to break through, though they seem to protrude and recede constantly but they’re right there at the surface. It’s pretty evident he’s uncomfortable but he’s a really tough little man and hasn’t had any noticeable negative effects from teething. At his 6 month weigh in he was 28 inches tall (92th percentile) and 19 pounds 4 ounces (75th percentile). He’s as healthy as can be and eats everything we put in front of him. He loves all sorts of foods and eats everything including fruits, vegetables, meats, and grains. I have yet to find a single food he does not like. He’s wearing 12 month clothing because he’s so tall, though it often gaps at his waist which is comparatively quite small. He said “ma ma” the other day for Andy but we’re having some difficulty getting him to repeat it – Andy says it counts, I don’t. He’s back on a normal schedule finally after our San Francisco trip, so everything relating to Riley is wonderful.
So having updated the world on the status of my baby, I’ll take a break from blogging for the night and hope for more inspiration tomorrow. And if all else fails, at least Andy has a few funny tidbits to add for the time being.
Category: Atlanta Life
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20
August
Many Tea Party members have recently claimed that MSNBC’s extreme leftist bias has caused viewership to decline so rapidly, the network will be forced to call it quits within the next few years. This is partially true, however the decline in viewership is actually due to a bid by Apple CEO Steve Jobs to sabotage the computers at MSNBC headquarters used by their research staff to show only articles from servers in Sweden.
Category: Mythstarters
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