Old Friends and a Dancing Queen

Last night I was either very brave or very stupid and attended a wedding with the kids by myself. Shannon took some St. Peter's kids to Six Flags, and my other baby sitters were unavailable. This was not an event I was going to miss, short of illness or severe temper tantrums, so we all packed up and went. The bride was the daughter of a friend I worked with when I did OB at Capitol Region Medical Center, and I haven't really seen or talked to my CRMC friends in a couple years, so it was really important for me to go. I was really touched and excited that they thought to invite me. I was really happy I went, and I had a really good time, but it was certainly a challenge. Madeleine's age and tendency towards fearless exploring make her a one-on-one charge. Noah's pretty low-maintaince at this point, unless he's hungry, which is often (we call him the Hungry Hungry Hippo!) or bored. Luckily, toddlers and newborns are cute and I have friends that are grandparents who like to help.

Madeleine really likes to dance and she really likes bubbles, so she was in absolute heaven when someone fired up a toy bubble machine.



A lot of the little kids dug the bubbles, and clustered around jumping and dancing and running into each other, forming a baby mosh pit


And even though she didn't get a nap, we couldn't tear her away from the dance floor. Actually, that's not entirely true. She tore herself away a couple of times to run up the stairs and crash another wedding reception that was going on at the hotel.
But when she wasn't making a break for it, she was spinning, jumping, and running around with the big people on the dance floor.




As if to prove his Cerneka-ness, Noah slept for the whole evening, even through the loud dance music at the reception. He did wake up to eat twice, but went right back to sleep.

Suzan (holding Noah), Cindy, and Me.
I met Suzan and Cindy when I worked at CRMC. They are exceptional ladies, and exceptional nurses. I feel like the whole time I spent at CRMC was blessed for me. It was extremely challenging and I grew a lot from my experiences there, not only as a professional nurse, but also as a person and a woman. Suzan and Cindy were two of the people who I met there that contributed to that growth. Suzan and I struggled together to learn OB and labor and delivery, and bonded over the insanely busy nights, the sometimes scary situations we found ourselves in, and the difficulties we had working with a physician or two. She is a wonderful Christian woman with a HUGE heart. Cindy is perhaps the person the most responsible for my decision to move into neonatal intensive care, and she certainly inspired me to want to transport. Before she worked at CRMC, she worked on my unit as a transport nurse for several years. She knew I enjoyed taking care of our level 2 kids (mild respiratory distress/pneumonia/blood sugar issues, etc), and she told me that if I was truly interested in intensive care I should go work for the University. I have a ton of respect for Cindy's knowledge and experience, and felt like God was using her to speak to me, to encourage me, and to give me the confidence to try it out. I was intimidated by the ventilators, by the ICU drugs and the teensy doses, the critical nature of the illnesses, and the teensy size of the people I would be taking care of. It turns out, those very things, the things that put the "Intensive" in NICU, are the very things I love about my job.