Summer!

I am finally done with year two!!!!  After I finished finals I slept 12 hours and it was fabulous!  Chris and I made up for missed sun light by enjoying a trip to the farmer's market, where we bought tons of fresh produce to try a recipe from The Chew.  After a fun morning, we loaded up the crazies and took them on their first adventure at Kickapoo State Park. It was so much fun.  I tried to snap a few pictures but getting the 4 of us in one place was harder than I thought it would be!!!    

Chris, Ally and Elsie.  As you can see we don't need a tape measure at our house...we just measure things in dog tongue lengths-we have enough!!

 

This was attempt one at getting a pic of the 4 of us. 

 

Attempt two was slightly better.   We were petty tired after all the adventures... or at least Elsie was.

After catching up on sleep and relaxing, I started work.  It's nice to work 40 hours and then be able to come home and not have anything to do!  I have learned a lot already and can't wait to finish training and answer calls!  I also can't wait for my first pay check!  This is my first weekly check since high school...hopefully its a lot more than it was back then :)!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Stress Relieving Crafts

With only 10 days left standing between me and summer, it is time to implement crafting as a stress reliever (also complete and total study freak out mode-but the pictures from that one are not as much fun :).  My mom's birthday is today.  I decided to put my crafting to use for someone else's house (for which my husband is very grateful!).  I made a wreath (was anyone really surprised by that?) with her house number and body scrub

 The wreath turned out amazing.  At first I was worried about finding a color that would look good with her red door.  Turns out the purple looked great and stood out really well.  Originally I wasn't planning on the white edging to the numbers, however, the purple blended quite a bit with the wooden wreath. Luckily I had the white paint pen from another project (I'm starting to feel like a real crafter since I now have all kinds of leftovers that come in handy!).  I really like the way the outline turned out!

Since it was my mom's birthday, I couldn't resist offering a little advice on how to keep calm...

 I also decided to try my hand at homemade, spa products.  This recipe used olive oil, sugar and essential oils.  I found oils online that were supposed to be in stock at the mall.  While I met a very pushy man who thought I should use some really random smell for my body wash, the vitamin shop was a bust.  Luckily, there was a random table set up in the middle of the mall selling lanterns and oils to use as fragrance.  After smelling some really weird things, I decided on sandalwood (its supposed to be relaxing) and apple cinnamon (who doesn't want to smell like apple pie???).  The body wash was easy to make. I'll have to see what my mom says on how well it works!

Since I am madly in love with the KEEP CALM sayings, I decided my husband needed to be inspired too.  The best way? Buy him a new shirt (good thing he will wear anything:)! 



Finally, I finished a craft that I had been working on for a while.  A flower made of scrapbook paper.  I love the way the colors turned out!  It was an amazing stress reliever!!

Roadtrip

Chris and I finally had a weekend that wasn't incredibly crazy so we went to Madison.  It was really great to see Dave and Laura.  Elsie also got to see her boyfriend, Colby (although I think they broke up after she got mad and tried to eat him).  We had an amazing weekend of studying (for me), gaming (for the boys), food and friends. 

Chris and I also were able to stop and see Jacq while she was in IN defending her dissertation (which she passed!!!!)  It was a nice visit and we can't wait to see her, Dan and their little one in November!!!!

Since we were driving through Indy, we had to stop because I really do love Chick-fil-a with all my heart.  Best. Dinner. EVER!

Friendship

Friendship is a funny thing. You make friends based on your current lifestyle and they seem easy to maintain. In college (if you went to a super small school like me:) everyone lived within a 5 block radius so visiting and finding time together is never an issue. The problem is each of you have your own pathway to follow in life. Maintaining friendships across those pathways becomes much more difficult. Dreams change, some paths get closer while others spread further apart. The amount of work required, the divergence of paths and finding time to dedicate to friends is suddenly not as easy as it was in the past.

Keeping up with friends from high school or college changes as your lives change. What you had in common is now the past. Remaining current in their lives requires more information because it no longer coincides quite as much with your life. While this means many more stories (Story time!!!), it also means more time, new people to remember and relationships to keep straight. Within the blink of an eye you find yourself on a whole different path than your friends. The goals you shared have all been accomplished. The new goals set are no longer similar. With changing goals comes lifestyle changes. It is pretty easy to find yourself and your friends in whole new places in your lives that may or may not correlate. Suddenly you find yourself struggling to relate to each others lives.

Relating to new places in your friends life requires time. However, we all are trying to figure out our place in the world and discovering that place requires a lot of time and dedication. Finding time to catch up with old friends can become more difficult. Plus coordinating schedules is a lot harder with the individual commitments, distance, and time changes.

All these factors mean that friendship is suddenly a lot more work than it had been previously. So what do you do? Do you let friendships go? Do you continue to work hard to maintain them?

There are times when you are having a rough week and haven't had time to tell any of your friends about the stresses of that particular week. It's that card that comes in the mail to tell you that someone thinks you are great, that they realize how hard school is and want to congratulate you on being half way done. It is that card that really makes you smile and reminds you why maintaining friendships is so important.

So pretty much this was a really long way to say thanks for the card-it made me smile, it made my week better and made me think about all the friendships I have that are worth the work to maintain.

Wreath Obsession!

With midterms behind me, only the hovering doom of two remaining finals and my summer plans complete, I find myself with nothing to stress about and a lot of down time. Of course this leads to CRAFTS! What else did you expect from me? Yesterday I was quite the crafting machine. After the test I went shopping for a little retail therapy (ok in my case it is mostly window shopping therapy but still equally fun) and purchased a few things to craft with!


The first thing I did was update my holiday frame seeing as how it is no longer Easter. I wanted something fun, bright and fresh to celebrate spring. This is what I ended up with.
The bird house is my favorite part-nice find Jenna!!!

I have been wanting to make a house warming gift for friends who recently bought their first house. A few weeks ago I found the perfect house warming wreath but couldn't find the time to craft. The monogram wreath is the perfect gift since they can hang it on their new front door but also because it celebrates their upcoming wedding!!!



The wreath was really easy to make (although it did require 6-8 glue sticks!!!). I love the contrast with the navy blue ribbon. I made the flowers out of leftover fabric. I really hope they like it (I also hope they are surprised since I haven't given it to them yet and have no idea if they read my blog...)


To continue along with my wreath obsession, I also finished a colorful spring wreath for my house. I love the bright colors and how fun it turned out.



Sorry the pictures aren't the greatest but by the time I finished all this crafting was a little dark outside. The hardest part of this wreath was wrapping the yard around the wreath and pipe cleaners. It took me a good hour and a half (and I had finished 1/3 of it before midterms). Good thing I love the finished product!!!

Passover

Chris, with his theology degree, enjoys learning and discussing religion and belief systems. Since I grew up atheist with some Jewish and Christian beliefs thrown in, I often get to introduce him to religious aspects from my childhood. This time we celebrated Passover with the help of my Grandma who sent us one of my favorite childhood treats, chocolate covered matzoh and some amazing Internet recipes of my favorite Passover dishes, matzoh ball soup and charoset. We had a lot of fun making new food, trying new things and discussing religion. It was was our last night of dates through the program at our church. By making food and celebrating the end of our date night adventures, we got to spend some much needed quality time together.

With how crazy our lives are right now, we are looking forward to summer. We have so many friends and family that we cannot wait to visit! I think Chris and I are both ready for more sleep, adventures and sunshine (ooh and crafting too but somehow I don't think Chris is super excited about that one)!


Although this is Chanukah related, I couldn't pass it up:)

Midterms

So I started blogging fairly regularly. Even though I had many blogs in mind for the last week, I unfortunately spent the days stuck in my vet school world preparing for midterms and only surfaced for a few hours to celebrate Easter with Mom, Gene, Abbey and Zach. Easter was an amazing celebration of faith, love and family.

Midterm prep however has not been as much fun. Within the last 7 days I have spent somewhere close to 80 hours studying (while still attending 21 hours of class). I wish I could say that this weekend is going to be a nice relaxing time to recuperate however there is another midterm on Monday. Recently I saw a facebook post comparing being a solider to being a student. It said something to the effect of one of these is truly stressful the other is sitting in a library enjoying a $12 coffee drink. Now while I don't think that being a student is more stressful than fighting wars, I do think that the comparison was unfair for many reasons. While I am not worried about surviving, I am however totally stressed out most of the school year. I spend more than 30 hours a week in class then a minimum of 4 hours a day studying. The maximum hours I have spent studying on a day that I also had class is 7 and the maximum on a weekend is 12. School for me is set up so that every 4 weeks I either have midterms or finals each covering approximately 120 hours worth of class material. This has managed to stress me out for the last few years. I also believe that being a solider and being a professional school student are important for very different reasons. While protecting U.S. citizens is really important, without doctors, veterinarians, lawyers and a plethora of other educated people there would be no more society left to protect. Finally I have so much money in student loans that I can guarantee that you will never find me drinking a $12 beverage.
Now don't get me wrong, I am so excited to become a veterinarian and cannot wait for my future career. I do feel that people need to realize that all jobs in society are crucial to its function. Making comparisons like the one I saw on facebook are not only unfair but also making assumptions about something that you yourself have never experienced. With this note I will return to submerging myself in my vet school world. Wahooo Organ Systems Pathology :)