Fairhaven

Here are our photos of the camping trip to Fairhaven for the Labor Day weekend.

Kolby Practicing the Piano

So, I had to record Kolby playing the new piano song that he learned this week, Merrily We Roll Along, just because Michael and I were so impressed that he could actually play a recognizable song with the right notes and correct timing and everything after only taking two lessons. I was only planning on recording that one song, but after I started recording, Kolby wanted to play the song three times (he is supposed to practice each of his songs three times a day), and then play the two songs that he learned before this one. After I finished recording him, he wanted to watch the video, and then he asked me if I would put it on the blog. Pretty cute! I think it's so fun that he enjoys practicing the piano, I'm really glad we started these lessons for him. He has his third lessons this afternoon, and he is excited to hopefully move on to learning the letters that go with each note (the first three songs he has learned in this piano book have numbers assigned to the child's different fingers, so they can learn which fingers go on which keys). Kolby has asked us several times to explain the letter notes to him that he sees on the next few songs in the book, but we keep trying to get him to just practice the songs his teacher assigned him for this week and let the teacher teach him the notes when she thinks he is ready. We'll see if that happens at his lesson today, or maybe next week. Now the hard thing will be to find a teacher that is as good, as inexpensive, and lives so conveniently close to us when we move to New York next year and Eli will be ready to start lessons too. (Eli has already asked me about piano lessons and has started his own little "piano practice" sessions some days when he pulls out the primary Children's Song Book and pretends to play the songs in it). And now Camden has even started to "play" the piano too -- the older two boys have enjoyed "playing" the piano for the last few months whenever we have family home evening, so they just play random notes and we sing the words of a church song -- and the last couple weeks Camden has insisted that he be able to play a song for family home evening too. It's fun to see the kids actually enjoying this -- I guess there really is something behind the idea of starting kids out young, because I remember not enjoying practicing my clarinet when I was in middle school and high school (and I never got very good at it because of my lack of practicing). Maybe if we start them all out when they are around age 5 and they think that practicing is still fun, then by the time they are older and might otherwise want to avoid practicing, maybe they will be good enough at playing the piano that they will actually enjoy it by that time. We'll see how it goes, but for now it is pretty fun to watch Kolby learning and liking it too.

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The Pod

Michael just took a couple of pictures of our “pod” that we packed up with our stuff for Utah. We didn’t think to take a picture of the New York one. They aren’t very big, are they? (They were about 6 by 7 feet). Can you believe we got all of our things into two of these? We just barely made it all fit, but it worked. And I bet you wouldn’t believe that the New York pod was even more full than this one – we ended up locking one of the doors shut and filling up the spaces right up to that door with little things, then closing the second door. But we were really glad that we made everything fit into the two pods, since it saved us a lot of money not to have to move and store a third one.

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.

December 9th, 2007

I am in the Chicago O’Hare airport waiting for my connection flight to Harrisburg, PA for a dermatology interview tomorrow in Danville, PA, about 1 hour north of Harrisburg. My scheduled flight to Harrisburg was cancelled due to bad weather out there (I think), and I got rescheduled for a flight later on tonight and put on standby for one later on this afternoon. So I get to spend the afternoon in the airport. :) Hopefully I get there ok.

Our family is now in Boise for the month of December and has been there for a week now. I am doing a month-long rotation with Dr. Randall Burr, a dermatologist that I know here, and I started with him on Monday. This week has been really fun as I have been able to follow and learn from him and help out from time to time. He has a very busy clinic, with regular clinic days on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, and then surgery days on Wednesday and Friday. He sees about 70-80 patients/day on his regular clinic days and does about 15 procedures on his surgery days – probably the busiest dermatologist I’ve seen. He loves what he does and is very good at it, so it is really nice to learn from him. Mostly I have been shadowing, but sometimes I take patients back to the rooms and get the history of why they are there, and then on the surgery days I have helped with cutting sutures and have even had a few chances to suture myself, which was really fun.

Tuesday after we finished with clinic I went with Dr. Burr to a monthly dermatology conference that is held at St. Luke’s in downtown Boise with all the local dermatologists. Several bring in patients with really hard or odd skin problems, and the group talks about suggestions of what those patients might have and how to treat and help them.

I also got a few more dermatology interviews this week – to University of Rochester in New York and University of Florida in Gainesville – so now I have 10 total dermatology interviews. We are so excited. Steph and I have spent a lot of time this week working on flights, hotels, and rental cars for all of these interviews. I also wrote my thank you notes to my interviewers at Scott and White in Temple, TX for the interview I had there last week. This next week is pretty busy with interviews: I am flying today to Danville, PA for a dermatology interview tomorrow; to Spokane, WA tomorrow for a transitional year interview on Tuesday; to Milwaukee, WI on Wednesday for a derm interview on Thursday; driving to Chicago, IL on Friday for a derm interview on Saturday; and then flying to Los Angeles, CA next Sunday for a derm interview next Monday – whew!! After returning to Boise for a couple days, I will have a transitional year interview in Salt Lake City, UT, and then I will be done with the interviews I have scheduled so far for this month, and will have a little break before the interviews start up again in January.

We have also had some fun this week with friends from Boise. Last Sunday we went to Layne and Debbie Bennion’s house (an uncle and aunt) for toffee and hot chocolate after the First Presidency Christmas devotional. We met with Neil and Becky Wall (one of my cousins) and decided to play games together this week. We ended up playing Cities and Knights of Catan with them at their house on Friday night after putting the kids to bed. It was really fun. Earlier that afternoon, we took the kids to the YMCA to swim. They have an awesome toddler pool at this YMCA, with slides and fountains and water at a perfect height for our boys. They also had a waterslide that I could go down with the boys on my lap (one at a time) that was so much fun. We’ll definitely be returning there to play some more.

Thursday night we went over to Bryce and Emily Christensen’s house for dinner and talking. Bryce and I went to high school together. They have two children as well, so our boys had fun playing with them. Kolby and Eli are usually pretty good about not getting into too many things. Camden is our baby now who loves to get into everything and either try to tear it up or eat it, so we had to watch him. Kim Woodings (another friend from high school) showed up after dinner, and we all had fun just catching up on each other’s lives, since it has been two years since we had seen any of them.

Yesterday we took the boys to the dollar store so they could get little Christmas presents for each other. I took Kolby with me and Steph took Eli with her so that the presents they chose could be a surprise for each of them. They really enjoyed that. Then we ended up at the mall and found some really cute sweaters and hats for the boys (using their Christmas money from my parents and Grandma Faun). I also found some new shoes for work. The brand is Dansko, and several people over the last few years have recommended them to me because they are so comfortable to wear, especially when you are on your feet all day for surgical procedures, and especially for someone like me with plantar fasciitis (pain in the bottom of my feet). The only reason I hadn’t gotten any before is because of the price – about $120. I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than $30 on shoes before, but my feet have been aching so much lately that I need something. The salesman said I can wear them around the house for the next few weeks to try them out and see if I like them, and then return them if I don’t, as long as I don’t wear them outside. And he said they are supposed to last 10-15 years, so we’ll see. I tried them around the house last night and they were really nice.

My parents took us and our boys to see The Bee Movie yesterday afternoon. It was cute and I think the boys really liked it. Then we went to dinner last night at Cass and Marci Smith’s home. They used to live in Milwaukee and recently moved out to Boise for him to start his first job as a pediatric gastroenterologist (a gut doctor). They have a beautiful home and we had so much fun catching up with them and our kids had so much fun playing together.

Well, I'd better go check and see if any of the flights or gates have changed – they seem to like to do that at the Chicago O’Hare airport. Hopefully I get to Pennsylvania in time for my interview tomorrow.