A Fun Concert and Other Goings On

I’m going to write this week’s blog post, since Michael is on call at the hospital overnight today. We had a pretty good week this week. The boys really enjoyed their swim lessons, and we had fun swimming together after their lesson on Tuesday. Michael went and renewed his driver’s license this week, which was a pain – it took him several hours. But since he had a Utah driver’s license he was able to get a library card, so on Thursday night for Eli’s night out they rode bikes (Eli rode in the bike trailer) to the library and got a library card and checked out a few books and a couple kids movies, and then rode all over town before coming home. On Friday morning I used one of the library movies to bribe the boys into helping me clean up the dining room and kitchen upstairs for a couple hours – they really are good little workers. We got all the counters cleared off, organized things, took out the trash, and put away all the stuff that had started to accumulate upstairs. And on Friday evening Grandma Faun watched the boys so that Michael and I could go on a fun date. We stopped for Mexican food and then headed out to the Sandy Amphitheater for a concert by Michael’s favorite pianist, Jon Schmidt. This is the third time I have seen him perform, and it is always an enjoyable experience because he plays a variety of music – fast, slow, spiritual, patriotic, and funny – and he makes all sorts of funny comments and little performances between the songs, so it doesn’t get boring just sitting for a while. There was also a kid from Wisconsin who opened for him. His name was Jon Troast, and he played the guitar. We liked his songs a lot, and ended up getting his CDs (which we don’t often do). Now all I need to do is replace my computer speakers that got the wires broken somehow in our move, so that we can actually listen to the new music. It was a fun night. On Saturday I googled free things to do in Salt Lake, and we ended up going to a place called Wheeler Farm. There were all sorts of farm animals for the kids to see, they fed some ducks and geese, they were excited to climb up on some old farm tractors to take pictures, and we took a short wagon ride. Michael remembered going there in elementary school, and afterwards he commented that his childhood memories of the farm were much more exciting than our trip yesterday. But the kids had a lot of fun. When we got home they were very excited to tell Grandma Faun all about the wagon ride and all the animals. After naps and dinner, we headed over to the church for an activity with a handful of families. They had sports and snacks for the kids. It was fun to talk with some of the younger families a little more. One thing that was not so fun, though, was waking up to Eli throwing up in the night last night. After cleaning him all up and putting him back to bed, it seriously took me another hour to fall back to sleep – how annoying to just lay there in bed and not be able to rest. So, Michael left early this morning for the hospital, and I stayed home from church with the boys. Luckily it seems that Eli was not really sick, but just ate too much cookies and candy at the activity last night, since he hasn’t been sick at all today – I would always prefer that, because if he were sick it would be very likely that the rest of the boys would get sick too, and all of the kids throwing up is just about my least favorite thing in the world to deal with, so it’s good that he seems to be doing well. Michael called from the hospital this morning and said that his team had 15 patients, which is a lot for one team, and that none of the patients were scheduled to be discharged today, and I haven’t heard from him since then, so hopefully he hasn’t had a terribly busy day, and hopefully he’ll be able to get some sleep tonight. This surgery month has really not been as bad as we expected, although overnight call is rarely fun. We are looking forward to his next rotation, which will be an elective, so he can have four weeks without working overnight or on the weekends. That will be a nice break for him to catch up on some sleep. (But, it will also mean that he will be closer to his next rotation after that, internal medicine, which we’ve heard is one of the busiest rotations with frequent overnight call).