The Next Survivor Series

I got this e-mail from my friend, Emily Christensen, and thought it was very cute -- this is a reality show I might actually watch:

The Next Survivor Series

Six married men will be dropped on an island with one car and 3 kids each for six weeks. Each kid will play two sports and either take music or dance classes.

There is no fast food. Each man must take care of his 3 kids; keep his assigned house clean, correct all homework, and complete science projects, cook, do laundry, and pay a list of 'pretend' bills with not enough money.

In addition, each man will have to budget in money for groceries each week. Each man must remember the birthdays of all their friends and relatives, and send cards out on time. Each man must also take each child to a doctor's appointment, a dentist appointment, and a haircut appointment.

He must make one unscheduled and inconvenient visit per child to the Urgent Care. He must also make cookies or cupcakes for a social function. Each man will be responsible for decorating his own assigned house, planting flower s outside and keeping it presentable at all times.

The men will only have access to television when the kids are asleep and all chores are done. The men must shave their legs, wear makeup daily, adorn himself with jewelry, wear uncomfortable yet stylish shoes, keep fingernails polished and eyebrows groomed. During one of the six weeks, the men will have to endure severe abdominal cramps, back aches, and have extreme, unexplained mood swings but never once complain or slow down from other duties.

They must attend weekly school meetings, church, and find time at least once to spend the afternoon at the park or a similar setting. They will need to read a book and then pray with the children each night and in the morning, feed them, dress them, brush their teeth and comb their hair by 7:00 am.

A test will be given at the end of the six weeks, and each father will be required to know all of the following information: each child's birthday, height, weight, shoe size, clothes size and doctor's name. They will also need to know each child's weight and length at birth, time of birth, and length of labor, along with each child's favorite color, middle name, favorite snack, favorite song, favorite drink, favorite toy, biggest fear and what they want to be when they grow up.

The kids vote them off the island based on performance. The last man wins only if . . . he still has enough energy to be intimate with his spouse at a moment's notice.

If the last man does win, he can play the game over and over and over again for the next 18 to 25 years, eventually earning the right to be called ‘Mother.’

Going to Salt Lake City, Utah and then to Rochester, New York

We found out this morning that we are going for our first year to LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah for Michael’s transitional year program and then our next three years will be at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York for his dermatology residency. Michael and I were both pleasantly surprised out the outcome of the match. Honestly, lately when people have been asking me about our top choices, I had forgotten that Rochester was near the top of our list.

So, we will leave sometime in the next few months for Utah. We are planning on living in my grandma’s basement in Salt Lake (no, that’s not a bad thing – her finished basement is actually quite a bit larger than the apartment we are currently living in, and she has a fenced-in back yard that I’m sure the boys will enjoy in the summer time. Michael is also looking forward to all the chances we will have to visit with his siblings and grandparents that live in Utah. And I am planning on taking advantage of living near the world renowned Family History Library in Salt Lake. And it will also be nice to be out west for a little while so we will be closer and it will be a little easier to visit family.

Rochester should be a good place for our family to go for the following three years too. It is in beautiful upstate New York, within half an hour of Palmyra, an important location in our church’s history and the location of a temple. We thought it would also be fun to attend the yearly Palmyra Pageant (and who knows, maybe even become cast members in the pageant). Plus we will be close enough to other fun places like New York City, Washington D. C., Niagara Falls, and other historical locations to go for a weekend trip once in a while. It will be interesting to try to decide in these next few months if we will be looking to buy a home or just rent while we are out in New York, and if Michael is going to do a one-year fellowship in Mohs Surgery following his residency in New York.

We are excited to start this new part of our lives, and now we have to sit down and figure out all the little details about moving, looking into schools for the kids, etc. We’ll be sure to keep everyone up to date with everything that is going on in our lives.

Waiting Game

Well, tomorrow’s the big day! The Match starts at 11am, but I’m sure we’ll be getting up pretty early in the morning to get the kids ready and get over to the school in plenty of time to get enough seats for us and all our boys next to each other. I have not really been nervous so far, waiting for Match Day, but tonight am feeling it a bit – not really nervous, I guess, just so many questions and thoughts running through my head. If we went to California we could be with my family . . . if we went to Texas I have heard the housing is so cheap . . . if we went to Pennsylvania we will be in a pretty small town, how would that be? . . . if we stayed here, I would be pretty bummed to have to last through four more Milwaukee winters . . . but if we stayed here we wouldn’t have to leave our friends . . . what is there to do in Ohio? . . . if we happened to get into New York City wouldn’t that be such a cool place to live? (and how could we ever afford it with all our kids?) . . . if we got into Florida that program has totally free medical insurance for the whole family – that would make a big difference . . . what if we ended up in some other Wisconsin program and had the cold winters to deal with, but didn’t have our friends? . . . if we went to Utah, we could live with my Grandma and save up for a house . . . how are we going to figure out if it is best to buy a house or just rent, no matter where we go? . . . I just have to keep telling myself to just wait one more day and then most of these questions won’t matter anymore because we won’t be going to all of these different places, just one or two of them. It’s pretty exciting! I’ll be sure to post tomorrow what we find out . . .

Thoughts on Moving

So, as Match Day is approaching I have been thinking more and more about moving. For those of you not familiar with how medical students end up in a residency program after graduation, here’s a quick explanation: The students apply for residency programs and then wait to get invitations for interviews. After interviews are over, each student makes a rank list of all the programs they interviewed with in order of preference, and turns in their lists in February. Each residency program also ranks the students that they interviewed. Then a computer takes all the lists and uses an algorithm to match every graduating student in the country with a residency program. Ideally, a competitive student would get their top choice, but many get one lower down on their list. So, on March 20th all the students come in and each one gets their name called and goes up to get an envelope that contains the results of the match. And that is a contract (you have to go at least for the first year, and you are expected to stay with that program for the remainder of the residency).

So, it is a very interesting time right now, while we wait for Match Day. We have quite a few choices of where to go, and most of them are very good programs that would be good places for Michael to do his residency. We are pretty confident that we will match somewhere, but we’re really not sure which program we are likely to match with. So, being in innate planner that I am, I have a bunch of different questions and thoughts all running through my mind about all the places that we might possibly end up:

• We are going to have to figure out all the stuff for school for Kolby wherever we go. We really aren’t old enough to have a kid old enough to be starting school, are we?
• If we went to Texas, I’ve heard we could afford a house, but would we be able to sell it without a problem when we leave after residency?
• If we went to Pennsylvania, how would it be living in a small town? We could do lots of outdoor things, except when it’s too cold in the winter. But we could also take trips and do all the East Coast stuff.
• How are we going to get wherever we go? We have the van and the car – and driving separately on a long move doesn’t really appeal to me. Is it worth it to take that car with us, or should we just sell it to yet another medical student? But we don’t really want a car payment at this point if we can help it.
• What if we happened to end up in New York City, how would we be able to afford to live there? But wouldn’t it be so cool to live near all those great sites in the histories of our country and our church?
• How is it going to be to move into a normal family ward after being here with all the other student families who are in our same situation? Are we going to be the only young family in the ward? Will we be the busiest/noisiest/wildest family in the ward with all our little boys?
• How humid is it in north-central Florida? Would the humidity be better than living someplace with a really cold winter? We could take a day trip to the beach. :)
• What kind of insurance coverage are we going to have, and how will I figure that all out?
• What if we went to San Diego for a year? There are so many things I would love about that. We would be with family, save money on rent for a down payment on a house, and be able to enjoy the beautiful weather there. Where would we put our furniture and the things we wouldn’t need there?
• If we move someplace for a transition year before the derm residency starts – it will take a lot of effort to get to know everyone and unpack and get settled in, just to pick up and move again a year later.
• Rochester, New York would be amazing, but cold. But when are we ever going to have a chance again to live on the East Coast?
• Wouldn’t it be cool to have a house and a yard? I could decorate and we could plant a garden and the kids could play in the yard. But we are pretty ignorant about buying a house – how will we figure all that out? We would have to buy all the big appliances and worry about maintenance and upkeep.
• What kinds of things are there to do in Ohio? I bet it would be similar there to Milwaukee.
• Maybe our van would actually run ok if we moved to someplace warm – it runs fine in the summer here, but in the cold winter weather it frequently needs to be jumped and lately has started to kill sometimes when we stop at traffic lights, even though we have replaced the battery several times and no mechanic can figure out the problem. We’ll see.
• Salt Lake would mean we could live in my grandma’s finished basement (which is larger than our current apartment), and save up money for a house. But the transition year there said their interns are busier at the hospital than some other programs – it would probably be ok, but Michael’s going to be gone enough as it is, so would I really want him to be more busy than he might somewhere else?
• Tonight the temperature here in Milwaukee is in the negatives. Just about any place would have to have a better climate than this, right? :) Too bad for the winters here – otherwise Milwaukee would be a rather nice place to live.
• How are we ever going to find friends as good as the ones here?
• I feel like there are so many things to be thinking about, and I am just scratching the surface. I wonder what else there is to figure out that I haven’t even thought of yet. I just have to keep myself from really thinking about it too much, since I can’t do anything but wait at this point.

I am excited about starting out someplace new, but at the same time I am feeling rather sad that we will likely be leaving our friends here in Milwaukee and will not see many of them again. This is an exciting time for us coming up, so it will be really interesting to see how it all turns out.