Today was a good day

Today I woke up with the sun in my face and a song in my head.

I went to Mass with all the 2nd graders and got to live in their world for a little bit.  

I drank some perfectly strong coffee while eating a grapefruit and reading a book by the window. 

As I sat there with the sun shinning in reflecting off of the fresh snow I couldn't help but smile and thank God for this simple but perfect day.

Grey's

"A couple of hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin shared with the world the secret of his success. Never leave that till tomorrow, he said, which you can do today. This is the man who discovered electricity. You think more people would listen to what he had to say. I don’t know why we put things off, but if I had to guess, I’d have to say it has a lot to do with fear. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, sometimes the fear is just of making a decision, because what if you’re wrong? What if you’re making a mistake you can’t undo? The early bird catches the worm. A stitch in time saves nine. He who hesitates is lost. We can’t pretend we hadn’t been told. We’ve all heard the proverbs, heard the philosophers, heard our grandparents warning us about wasted time, heard the damn poets urging us to seize the day. Still sometimes we have to see for ourselves. We have to make our own mistakes. We have to learn our own lessons. We have to sweep today’s possibility under tomorrow’s rug until we can’t anymore. Until we finally understand for ourselves what Benjamin Franklin really meant. That knowing is better than wondering, that waking is better than sleeping, and even the biggest failure, even the worst, beat the hell out of never trying."          

"you are the content of your character. you are the ambitions that drive you. you are the goals that you set. you are the things that you laugh at and the words that you say. you are the thought you think and the things you wonder. you are beautiful and desirable not for the clique you attend, but for the spark of life within you that compels you to make your life a full and meaningful one. you are beautiful not for the shape of the vessel, but for the volume of the soul it carries."          

Live each season as it passes;

breathe the air, drink the drink,

taste the fruit,

and resign yourself to the influences of each.

-Henry David Thoreau

I need an off switch

For my brain.


My pillow is magic. The minute my head hits the pillow I suddenly remember everything I have been pushing out of my head all day long.  Perfect timing. So my peaceful bedtime turns into a twisted mess of anxiety and worries.  Just so much unknown and they are all somehow all connected. So just when I think I have one thing figured out I look how it changes something else and then I change my mind about what I just decided and the whole process starts all over again.


Ah but this isn't supposed to be a blog about ranting and all that glass half empty stuff. So let me try this again...

These next 6 months hold a lot of possibilities and though they scare the crap out of me I am delighted with the idea of another adventure.  I am also thrilled and very blessed to have Eric as my constant in this.  Even though everything seems to be a huge question mark for the next few years I can comfortably say that as long as I have my partner in crime things will work themselves out.

Hows that for a glass half full?

"We spend our whole lives worrying about the future, planning for the future, trying to predict the future, as if figuring it out will cushion the blow. But the future is always changing. The future is the home of our deepest fears and wildest hopes. But one thing is certain when it finally reveals itself. The future is never the way we imagined it."

Meredith Grey

A surprise morning

Normally I would be totally bummed out about a rainy day like today. The pouring buckets kind of rain. But today started out with a phone call at 5am from work asking me if I would like to stay home because they had too many nurses. I don't even think I let her finish her sentence before answering with a firm and excited, " yes."


As I hung up the phone I heard a crash of thunder and pulled those blankets over me for a few more hours...

to begin again

So I came across this old thing a few months back and then again recently. I love how much clarity I seemed to have back when I was a more frequent blogger. Maybe it was the blogging that was the root of that clarity or maybe it was just where I was in my life at that time. Regardless, I figured it doesn't hurt to give this another go and once again use the internet as an outlet and an insight into my life.

A lot has happened since my last post of Feb 2011. I graduated and finally am practicing as a nurse.  The journey to get here was long, slightly twisted and a story for another time. The brief version: I am now starting my second year as a OB nurse in Chicago.  yes, Chicago. Who the hell would have guessed that.  Never saw this one coming. This past year has probably been one of the hardest but most beautiful year of my life. I do realize that sounds slightly odd but if I have learned anything this past year it is that sometimes you have to get to the end of your rope to realize how beautiful life really is.  It always comes back to that Paschal mystery;-). I have learned exactly what I am capable of and those boundaries that I have been so loyal too have been adjusted. As I sit here and write this I cannot help but crack up.  I grew up saying I wanted to be a librarian who lived next door to my parents. see, aren't you laughing too now?

Eric may have been the one who brought me here to this crazy city but it is this crazy job that is keeping me.  All through college I was told by so many professors that I would never land a job in OB right out of school so when I did I was shocked, confused, scared to death but above all so incredibly thankful.

My job and I have a love hate relationship but the word thankful seems appropriate.  I am thankful for that sacred moment where I hand a mother her infant for the first time and the tears that roll down the father's eyes. I am thankful for every terrified but trusting look I get from a woman right before she gives it one last push.  I am thankful for all those tiny toes I get to wash and the tiny fingers I get to hold.  I am thankful each time I get to show that clumsy, scared father how to hold his new baby and I am oh so thankful for that new baby smell.


At the end of the day it is still a job and like all jobs it comes with its own bag of stress and anxieties, there are the days where the tears that pour out the minute I get in my car to drive home, and the mornings where I cannot bring myself to get out of bed but underneath all of that is something truly beautiful for that-I am incredibly thankful.