The Family *roll

We started this blog a little over two years ago, mainly as a way to stay in touch with friends and family as our lives went through simultaneous dramatic changes: the birth of Eleanor and our move to Northfield. The time has come to wrap up the blog. You might have noticed that posting is a little slow of late. I won’t say that we’re too busy to blog. People that are as, or more, busy than us keep their blogs up. But as we get busier, blogging is less of a priority. Whereas at the start, we eagerly posted every few days, nowadays, we have exchanges like this:

Em: You should really update the blog.

Daniel: I know, I know. Will you do it?

Emily: I did it last time. It’s your turn.

Daniel: Fine. I’ll do it.

And then I don’t.

We’ve loved having our friends, families and some strangers keep up with us via the blog and we’re sorry to abandon those of you that are far away, or who want to know what it going on in our lives without having to actually talk to us. With any luck, the musical adaptation of the blog, *Rollin Along, will be on Broadway soon.

Adios interwebs and, as a grand finale, take it away Eleanor and Leo:

Eleanor, Daniel and I marched with Carleton in the Twin Cities Gay Pride parade on Sunday. Eleanor had a blast waving to her throng of adoring fans. Dan and I enjoyed the view.

Here are a couple of highlights.

1) I laughed:

Great sign, no?

2) I cried:

This little boy is wearing a shirt that says “I love my gay Dad.” I can barely keep the tears back when I see the “I love my two Moms” signs and so this little guy and his dad did me in completely.

3) I got heavily recruited by the Unitarian Universalists.

Carleton marched with the Northfield P-FLAG and Unitarian Universalists. I am very pro-Unitarian Universalist. They completely have my vote if Michele Bachmann gets elected and we all have to join a church. I had no idea, however, they were capable of the hard sell. Dan and I were more heavily recruited by the UUs than we’ve ever been by any old-fashioned proselytizing evangelical church.  Who knew.

4) Eleanor can rock the rainbow look:

5) I saw a lot of fantastic tushes.

We marched in between a float for a gay night club (seen above) and the gay pilots association. These are good-looking men. What struck us, though, was that the main attraction of the night club float looks exactly like our friend Pablo. Am I right, am I right?

My good news is that I passed my health assessment exam. This was a huge relief and we are going to celebrate in style this weekend: my mother is in town and Dan and I are taking off to Chicago on Friday for 3 Eleanor-less days.

One last note: after last week’s posting about nutsacks, I noticed that we all of a sudden got spam comments on the blog directing me to purchase knock-off handbags. Ball bags = hand bags in some sophisticated Internets algorithm.

I’ve just typed the following dreadful sentences while figuring out how to start this posting: “It’s been a touching summer so far….”, “I’ve been pretty touchy lately….” “Practice makes pervert!” and “I’m having a ball this summer!” (I think I might actually have more in me, but I’ll stop there). You see, this summer I am taking my physical assessment course. This is the course that teaches NPs how to do general wellness exams and the type of focused exams you need to do for musculoskeletal complaints, gynecologic visits, etc.

It’s also the course where you get to touch rubber balls*

We’ve used a number of “examination simulators” for the class so far. My favorite are the giant foam torsos with vaginas and anuses and penises that are all colored a type of peach-pink that is horrifyingly similar to blow-up sex dolls. The torsos are quite frankly funny. And they’re modular! They come with a large selection of diseased prostates, uteri and cervices that can be inserted and switched out at a moment’s notice with these very ungainly plastic rods. “OK, now that we’ve all felt ovarian torsion, let’s move onto the anteverted uterus!” (clink, clank, thunk thunk, sckreeek). The pregnant lady torso has a little bulb you can use to inflate “her” rubber belly like a balloon. You have to use a special foam-flesh-friendly lubricant to poke around in the model’s orifices. Let those words sink in: “foam”, “flesh”, “friendly”. And then add the word “lubricant.” Great stuff, huh?

While I find the torsos hilarious, I am totally embarassed by the little package of silicon testicles (see above). The testicles aren’t peach-pink like the torsos or candy-floss pink like the little cupcake-ish breasts we use to palpate for lumps. The testicles are decidedly flesh-colored. They’re also, uhhh, all alone. And alone in a really sad, rubbery way. I could barely keep myself together as I watched myself and other classmates grab the little tan-colored little rubber baggy, hold them up to the light and poke around for the pea-sized lumps a factory worker in China carefully placed for our education.

I’m pretty comfortable around real people’s genitals and breasts. I’m nervous but mostly really excited about my opportunity to practice pelvic exams with professional “medical teaching assistants” next month at a local Planned Parenthood. The great thing about nurse practitioners also having years of nursing experience is that we’ve made peace with bodies and bodily business.

But I am completely mortified by a rubber ball sack.

*valued at $107!

Finally, summer (leaving aside the fact that today it’s 60 degrees). With summer, comes summer activities: the pool, the pizza farm, the dunk tank. What’s that now? Oh yes, I agreed to sit in the dunk tank as part of senior week (as did Dan H.). By the time it was my turn, there weren’t many people around, which gave ample opportunity for friends and lovers to dunk me ad nauseum:

Fortunately, it was 100 degrees that day, so each plunge into the tank was sweet relief.

There has been a lot going on lately, including Eleanor’s second birthday and our 5th wedding anniversary (same day). My parents were in town, so Em and I spent a night in The Cities, where we walked, shopped, watched a movie and had an awesome meal. We also took in the Hmong Market in St. Paul, which has fabulous food and not-so-fabulous crap for sale. It’s nice to see, however, that the products for sale recognize the wide variety of personalities that you might want to inculcate in your daughter. For example:

But not everyone wants a delightful girl. Some people might want their daughter to be a little more toned-down thank you very much:

Oh Eleanor, the first thing I said when you were born was, “I hope you are benign. Benign like a benign tumor.” And now I’ve found the toy to make my wish come true.

Summer

NPR is asking listeners to submit their “summer sound”. I know exactly what my summer sound is here in Northfield: the damned train. There are two sets of train tracks that run through town. I think the trains mostly ferry grain and materials to the Malt-O-Meal factory.  The tracks run through several non-gated crossings and have to blow their 5000-tons-of steel-and-corn-coming through-motherfrackers whistle. The whistle is very, very loud.  So loud, in fact, that there’s an urban (rural?) legend that the train conductor’s ex-wife lives in Northfield and he amplifies and extends the whistle’s blow to piss her off.

The trains are loud enough that Eleanor stops what she is doing and helpfully adds “Choo choo!” when one passes through. This happens about 4-8 times a day. It also happens 2-6 times a night. You can only hear the night train when the weather is warm enough to open the windows; humidity also amplifies the sound. Cue my summer sound.

Our first night in our house here was a bit wonderful: Eleanor was sleeping soundly, Daniel was about to start his first real job after 7 years in graduate school, our house was beautiful and the town’s motto was “Cows, Colleges and Contentment” and it smelled like waffles. My sense of idyll lasted exactly until the first train rolled through. Oh. No. ”Don’t worry,” Northfielders assured me, “you get used to it!”.

And maybe I do. Maybe by every September I have 5-6 months’ worth of progressively less interrupted sleep. Maybe by October I would get used to it. But, dear Northfielders, October never comes. Instead, we close the bedroom windows and I have 6 months to get un-used to it.

A small, if loud, price to pay for the glory of summer.

It's empty

This Internet has a long history of fruitfully and hilariously exploring the connections between drunk people and small children (take this, for example). I’ve read that living with a toddler is like living with a tiny, angry drunk. They’re irascible, unpredictable and they don’t think twice before throwing punches. There is no doubt that this describes Eleanor at her worst. However, Eleanor at her best is like the best drunk person with whom you have ever had the pleasure of partying: she thinks everything is hilarious, she gives gives hugs and kisses to anyone (or anything) and tells them she loves them. She slurs her speech in an adorable way and makes inane, if charming, observations (“ball is pink!”). She stumbles but doesn’t hurt herself, drops things but doesn’t break them and says “uh-oh” a lot.

And then she sleeps for 12 hours.

OK Spring is really here. I know this because I had to mow the lawn today. Halfway through the lawn mowing, I ran out of gas. My newfound, Minnesota-cultivated guilt from a half-mowed (and a very dandelion-y) lawn compelled me to dig out the push mower from the shed and I finished the rest of the lawn, old school. This is not at all like me. Not at all.

Here are some pictures of our trip to the Minnesota Zoo. The zoo is awesome. During the winter, we were able to go quite often since the zoo has great indoor exhibits (tapirs! bats! toucans! pig-type creatures that look like they’re wearing toupees!). Imagine Eleanor’s surprise and pleasure to discover there is actually a whole outdoor zoo out there. There is also a “family farm” exhibit which is reached by riding a tractor train. For someone who loves tractors and trains as much as Eleanor, a tractor train is more than the sum of its parts. It is some kind of hybrid fantasticness on deep-tread tires. The family farm is a storybook place (with all the pages about slaughtering and steroids ripped out). Here is Eleanor mounting a delightful pig (that will certainly never grow up to be bacon). Here is Eleanor showing some leg to some chickens, who will never to turn into nuggets. Here is Eleanor cavorting with goats. I was actually less conflicted about the goats because I figure there isn’t a huge mutton market anymore. There aren’t any pictures of Eleanor sashaying around cows because she was terrified of them.

Besides making advances to farm animals, Eleanor is quite polite these days. She has perfected her “Thank you” and continues to be bilingual in her “Please”s: a happy if slightly wistful spoken “please” accompanied by the manic and aggressive chest-swiping sign language “please”. She will also kiss and hug on command. The best part is she will hug and kiss anything. This means she will stop on our way to the park to embrace a tree, post-box or sign post and declare “hug!”.

I am spending all of my cuddle time with my laptop finishing up my first final draft of my thesis which is due May 16th. It’s actually going pretty well. I’m also really looking forward to the two classes I am taking this summer: advanced health assessment and Primary Care I. So exciting!

The last post was a complete lie. Spring did not come, after all. Whatever progress we made in the garden was quickly halted by snow, sleet, snow, rain and temperatures that hovered around crap. This time last year we had tulips and lilacs and picnics. This year we have a whole lot of whining.

But we’ve been keeping busy.

Two weekends ago we continued our tradition of attending small-town church fundraising meals: the Little Prairie United Methodist Church’s fish supper.  The church, which donates space to my clinic, hosts this yearly event which, apparently, routinely sells out. Our friends M & T (who also gamely came to the Sons of Norway Christmas breakfast last December) came along. While I had purchased tickets for Dan and I, I figured that as long as we arrived at the church early enough, there would still be tickets available. Nope. Luckily, since the pastor and I see each other late on Tuesday nights (he writing a sermon, I finishing charting a patient’s complaints of perianal itching), he took pity on the ignorance of someone who couldn’t imagine that the limited supply of 600 fish supper tickets hadn’t already been sold. Therefore, with a nod of his pastoral head, he granted permission for the ticket takers to dispense 2 extra tickets for our friends.

2 Jews waiting for their church supper

The fish was really quite delicious (600 people are quite right to plan ahead). The highlight of the meal, however, was the “salad bar”. The salad bar consisted of home-made specialties from parishioners. Most of these salads had a sugar-based component: marshmallows, maraschino cherries, glace pineapple, etc. One salad – my favorite  - combined raisins and uncooked ramen noodles. Poor T. almost vomited after making the surprising finding that the white chunks in a mayonnaise-based salad were marshmallows, not potatoes.

We continued our dedication to Minnesotana with our first trip to Duluth, commonly known as the Paris or San Francisco of Minnesota. Dan was offered the chance to give a lecture at the U. Minnesota – Duluth so we all took a trip together. It was actually our first trip where we were not visiting friends or family or staying with someone and it was a wonderful to explore a new place all together. The really wonderful thing is that we chose a great place to explore. Duluth doesn’t really need to be compared to another city, it’s really quite lovely on its own.

Daniel and I ate our weight in smoked trout marveling at the industrial behemoth of a coal port city next to the dark blue waters and stunning shoreline of Lake Superior. Eleanor fell in love with swimming in the hotel pool and watching the 1000-foot-long boats come in to the harbor. We all loved having a hotel suite. We ate remarkably well and even had a night out thanks to the babysitting services of a UMD political science major. While Dan gave his talk, Eleanor and I spent the afternoon at the railway museum where we were the only 2 people in a football-field-sized hangar full of train engines, cabooses, passenger cars (some displaying china from dozens of different passenger lines) and the largest model train installation I have ever seen. We had a blast clambering into the different train cars and hollering “Chugga chugga” to each other. We took a drive up the coast to Two Harbors where we took a beautiful – if brief and blustery – walk along the be-birched and pine-y lakeshore. I really can’t wait to go back.

And now we’re back and I’m in end-of-term mode with several exams to study for. Additionally, the first draft of my thesis is due in a couple of weeks. Glarg. There is also some upset with my clinical rotations that has been a pain. Glurg. Eleanor is starting 5-days-a-week daycare in a couple of weeks which I’m anxious about. Glaurg.

But we’re all well and the daffodils, at least, are in bloom. We’re all terribly excited for Baby Decker to come and Eleanor’s hair is finally growing and Dan’s hair has finally been cut. Our tax return might be sufficient to fund roof repairs and new windows and we booked our tickets to the Groll cottage this summer.

There is, however, snow forecasted for tomorrow.