Year in Review

A friend recently asked me what the best and worst moments of 2013 were, and as I thought back it was truly hard to believe the incredible amount of change that has occurred in the past 365 days.

Here's a really brief summary of my year:

8... months of accutane

5... years of marriage

5... countries visited (US, Canada, Haiti, Slovenia, Croatia. My first real mission trip and my first trip to Europe in the same year! I never would've seen that coming.)

4... distinct seasons of life conveniently marked by the seasons of the year (a dark winter, a testing spring, a leap of faith and lessons in rest and trust this summer, and relief and abundance this fall)

3... number of new jobs I've had in the past year 

3... number of oceans I visited! (Pacific, Atlantic, and Adriatic Sea. Amazing.)

2... Gospel Communities

2... times we drove to DFW, effectively doubling the number of times we've visited since moving 4 years ago. Miss that place!

1... blog redesign. Click over to check it out! (Credit to Jessi from Naptime Diaries for working so patiently with me.)

1... graduate school class. Yikes. (Halfway done, but in a holding pattern right now.)

1.... precious baby on its way!


Here's another summary via my Instagram pictures!  To avoid confusion, keep in mind the video starts with this December and moves backward, ending last January. Whew! What a year.

What went into passing the RNC

-A year of dilly-dallying with studying, and 2 months (easily over 50 hours) of real, focused studying

-1 major snowstorm forcing me to reschedule

-2 entire highlighters and 1 pen went into studying

-7 packs of notecards

-countless breaks to bake something

-1/2 bottle of Tums in the last month and 6 cans of ginger ale in the last week consumed to control stress-induced nausea

-a dozen attempts to look up a word in the medical terminology dictionary only to be distracted by a gruesome picture of something completely unrelated to neonatology

-2 dozen attempts to look up a word on Google, only to get distracted by social media sites

-2 pictures in my neonatology textbook that freaked me out. Both were in the dermatology section.

-1 major cut (finger, bathroom toilet handle in Oklahoma, fear of unknown germs invading) and 1 major burn (boiling water, 20% of my forearm) sustained in the last month of studying. I get even more clumsy when I'm stressed out.

It's starting to heal, but that's gonna be a nasty scar

-3: the number of co-workers who told me the test was no big deal and I didn't need to study so much.

-2: the number of co-workers who freaked me out and made me study my butt off. (For the record, I did study my butt off and I absolutely don't feel that I overstudied.)

-Less than 20 of my co-workers are certified- all but 1 (soon to be 2, not including me) are over the age of 30

-There are over 100 nurses on our unit

-175 questions, 2 hours, 1 huge sigh of relief!