MRI Scan

An interesting thing happened today. One of my patients was sent to the MRI scanner to check for a brain cancer. He had been having some mental status changes and had a history of lung cancer a few years back that was removed. We were looking for metastases of the original cancer. When we were looking through the slices of the MRI, instead of finding a mass, we saw this:

(Sorry the picture is a bit fuzzy, I put the copy of his scan up on our fridge and took a picture of it. This is the best I could get)

Pretty amazing, huh?
Apparently, this patient is being taken care of by somebody other than us!

Piggies!

Julia's Auntie Annie came for the week to help us babysit and spend some time with her favorite niece. They have a BLAST together. The first day we came home from work, Julia had pigtails in her hair! I never thought of doing that. I guess I need lessons in doing hair. Julia always pulls her barrettes out and I never dreamed she would let Annie put pigtails in let alone KEEP them in. She was so cute I had to take some pictures. Perhaps I will try putting pigtails in for church some time. With my luck, I will accidentally pull out one of her long hairs (they are preciously few in number) and then I will just feel guilty about the whole thing.....

Easter fun

Happy Easter, everybody! Christ is Risen! Yay!

Hope you had a good Easter. As I was stuck on call on Sunday, we had to cram our traditions and festivities in on Saturday. We spent the supper hour on Easter Sunday eating Papa John's (Mommy's favorite) in the call room at the hospital. It wasn't really a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting, but it worked for us. Julia has learned that when she is hungry, she should just ask for the hospital....because that is where you go and eat, of course!


All set to go! We drove the 2 1/2 hours down to St. Cloud at noon on Saturday and came back the same day. It was a lot of driving, but it was definitely worth it.
A line of butts. My cousins were all looking out the patio window at a Bald Eagle outside. Instead of looking at the eagle, I snapped a picture of the butts. :)
This is Sofie, Annie's new puppy. She is SO cute! I couldn't figure out how to make her eyes look normal. They aren't really that creepy green hue in real life.Playing Memory with Grandma
Hmmmm....what does "Butterfinger Egg" mean?
The Easter Dress. (Daddy made it from scratch!) The dress underneath is really cute, too. Perhaps I should ask Mike to make me an enormous pregnant-sized Mumu to match Julia's dress and we can be twins...... ;)

Eggs and cookies

Last night, we made the biggest mess the kitchen has ever seen. But what fun it was!!!!! Yup, it was time to dye Easter Eggs. Plus, Mommy and Julia had made a double batch of sugar cookies last weekend that desperately needed frosting. So, off to work we went.

Here's the eggs:Julia couldn't resist tasting one. Since she knows how to crack an egg, she decided to show off her skills. Her punishment: eat the egg. She didn't seem to mind much. It was pretty funny when she ate the entire yolk in one bite. Her mouth was full of dry yellow yolk powder. I was laughing so hard I didn't get the chance to snap a picture.

Julia was so enthusiastic about dyeing eggs that it took both of us, full time, to prevent a big spill of egg dye. She would chuck the egg into the dye and simultaneously grab for the next mug and egg. She was literally shaking all over with excitement.
You are right....Mike does not look particularly happy in this photo. You see, Daddy's tolerance for messes is much lower than Mommy's. Apparently, we had surpassed his threshold by this time. (I think it had something to do with the frosting on the walls and the dye dripping into his lap....)

Onto the frosting! When we were working on the cookies, Julia would frost one, then taste it, then move on to the next one. Finally I figured it out. She knew I didn't want her tasting the frosting directly from the spoon....and cookies are for eating...right?.....so, she would simply take a blank cookie, smudge some frosting on it, and it would suddenly become fair game for eating. I got smart after that. I gave her a broken one and let her frost it.....and then eat the frosting off...and then frost it again...etc. Wheee!
Working with Daddy
The fruits of our labor. (Multiply this by about seven. We had a LOT of cookies.)

I love Duluth.....

An ode to Duluth

When the cold winter wind starts to blow,
And TV says "Lake Effect Snow,"
You hide in your bed
And cover your head
For when dawn breaks your husband shouts, NOOOOOOOOOO.......

Our New Camera

Yay! It's here! Our new digital camera looks exactly like the last one we had (you know, the one taking the long vacation in Grand Cayman?) and it has exactly the same controls, too. To my dismay, our last model was discontinued (Sarah panics) and I was afraid I'd have to learn a new digital camera......not my idea of a fun seven hours. Anyways, this one is almost the same thing, not too expensive, and a tiny bit smarter than the last one. So, here are some recent pictures of The Julia:

Nice and clean! We got home from shopping at 9 tonight, gave the kiddo a bath, and here she is, on her way downstairs for a bedtime snack. Gotta love the Loon slippers.....Watching Baby Einstein. Daddy and I allow ourselves to plop her in front of the TV once every other day for a half hour while we try to clean up her wake. It's the only thing she'll sit still for besides Mac and Cheese.
Julia strongly objects to riding in the stroller. She would rather walk and splash in every single puddle imaginable along the way. Our usual 15 minute walk can take an hour. So we strap her in, and she stretches out and tries to look miserable. poor little baby....
This picture is from this morning. I told Julia that Daddy went to warm up the car and it was time to go to Church. She had other ideas, and again, was expressing her objection. Looks convincing, huh?
Grinning from ear to ear....another trip outside...this time we let her do the walking. See the difference? I never worry about Julia's lack of opinion on the subject.

Chomp....

Still no digital camera. I miss our old camera and I miss all the pictures from our most memorable vacation....but thank goodness Kodak makes cheap easy share cameras and we ordered one online TWO WEEKS AGO. (Note: FREE super-saver shipping at amazon.com should be called FREE Unionized Unoppressed -Snail-worker shipping.) I keep checking the mail to see when it will arrive. I am starting to feel guilty about not posting any pictures up here. Mike says he's been keeping track of it with the "shipping tracker" through amazon.com. I didn't know you could do that! You can type in a ridiculously long number-letter code and suddenly, UPS will tell you exactly where your package is on the planet. Ours is currently sitting in a truck somewhere between Omaha and Duluth. Joy. Hopefully it is closer to Duluth than Omaha and it will come soon. You will know. I will plaster the blog with pictures of a kid, a dog, a messy house, you know, the usual.

Here is today's story.
Last week, when Mike went to pick Julia up from daycare, the little note that they always give us said, "biting." Naturally, my husband was curious, so he went to talk to Miss Amy about the situation. Turns out that Julia had been playing with a doll in the corner by herself, and Sam, a tiny tiny little boy her age, came over and wanted her to "share the dolly." Now, if you have every had a two-year-old or taken early childhood classes, you should know that two-year-olds *don't* share. Everything they can see is theirs. If they can remember seeing it at some time, it is also theirs. And if you take it away, you will pay the price.

Well, wee little Sam thought sharing the dolly would be a good idea, so he ripped it out of Julia's grasp and scurried off with it. My daughter, being the self-sufficient girl that she is, took off after Sam across the gym. She caught him (remember....he is little...she is tall and runs faster than her big pregnant mom can run) and instead of taking the doll back, she took another approach: she grabbed his forearm and BIT him. Chomp. Sam dropped her dollly and ran crying to Miss Amy. Julia took her dolly back and looked guiltily on as Miss Amy tried to comfort Sam and not burst out laughing at the same time.

When asked about the situation, Julia is rather up-front with us. You can ask her what happened when Sam took her dolly, and she will nonchalantly reply, "I Bit Sam. Naughty." This makes the asker of the question turn his or her head in the opposite direction and laugh (on the inside, of course.)

I hope Sam has learned his lesson. Don't steal from a girl. She will bite your arm and steal her dolly back. Watch out for women....they are trouble even when they are two. ;)

C-can't type...too cold...*thud*

That last sound was the sound of my cold frozen body hitting the floor as I attempt to type a blog entry. They say the high temperature has been around 24 degrees or so for the last week, but I just have a hard time believing that. Sure, it's so sunny outside you'd think it was June, but the yard is one gigantic glacier. Frozen solid - no joke. Complete with frozen dog-logs. And when I heard it was supposed to be colder still this coming weekend? Almost laughed for joy. Oh wait..no, I didn't.

On the plus side, right now I am literally gobbling down the most delicious fruit salsa Sarah has never made.

We did manage to find ourselves a new camera online (to replace the stolen one that is probably in some dumpster on Grand Cayman) for a screaming good deal. No sign of it yet, but we'll keep you all posted. J is being her usual cute self. The latest: she responds to her own questions, usually allowing herself to do things that she's hoping to do. Example: "Watch a show? Watch a show? Okay!" Example: "Want some candy? Want some candy? Okay!" Here's hoping she outgrows that one real soon.

No other news, really. Found out I got hired at St Luke's Hospital last week (yay!), then promptly went out and got the stomach flu. I'll spare you all the details. Sarah is on medicine at St Luke's this month, which is a welcome change from three-times-a-week call that she had in OB last month. No more frozen TV dinners for me! (Which is too bad, because we have a GIGANTIC freezer just outside to store them in.)

Send a little heat our way, will you?