New Life

I can't believe it's been like 3 months since I last posted! We've been busy with all sorts of things, including a move, family visiting, having a fun 2 week vacation, and starting something VERY new... rotations.

I won't be catching up in this post, but many details and pictures will soon follow! I will however describe what Joplin and this first 2 weeks of rotations has been like...

So we moved from Kirksville, MO. Oddly, enough they actually had a tornado recently too! May, 2009. We moved near the location of the tornado just a year later.



So Kirksville is a small town of about 17,000 and a Walmart. We LOVED it there. We will always look back on our time there VERY fondly and extremely miss our friends there!





This is part of downtown Kirksville. Also known as "the Square"
It was time to change though. Everyone else was moving elsewhere and we thought it was time to move on as well. We chose Joplin to further our adventure and it has proven to be an excellent choice for us. Joplin is about 50,000 i think, and is a wonderfully friendly city. Especially after the tornado, which occurred May 2011.

 

People just seem to understand each other a little more. You can still see quite a bit of damage from what happened, mostly in the trees, missing houses and stores, etc. but after only a year later they have picked up where they left off and most places are really doing well again. Our stake center was flattened. Only one wall stood after the tornado came through and they have quickly built a new one from the ground up, and should be ready in October.




This is when they added the steeple to our stake center near the 1 year anniversary of the tornado. I'm sure it was a very emotional time for everyone. They say it was hard to get around the city just because you had no idea which street was what. All the signs and familiar landmarks were gone. I can't imagine..

Anyway... we really love our place here and our street is so quiet and the neighbors are friendly. Our ward is very small and we meet in the Community of Christ building while our building is under construction. Alex loves this new step in his education and is learning so much already. He has started with the Internal Medicine (Hospitalist) rotation and it has been a HARD one for sure! He leaves around 6:45 every morning to get to his didactics (lectures) and is on his feet the rest of the day working non stop with an attending (full on doctor), the chief resident, and a first year resident (or intern). He is quite lucky to be the only student there right now, but it still doesn't give him all the experience he wants because a lot of the attention and focus goes toward the intern. So he works all day until the doctor calls it good and then he can start packing it up and going home. Sometimes that's 5:30, when we're lucky, and most the time it's more like 7:00. I've had to cope with not knowing when to expect him home and just dealing with it. Although his day is busy, it is still better that being in class and studying all day and night. He gets more hands-on learning and a doctor to ask him real life questions to learn from. Plus he spends the night with me, rather than the books at school. He does have to work 2 Saturdays this month, but hopefully that is not going to be required every rotation. I do love having the 4 week schedule though. It is so nice to say "we're half way done with this" when it is a hard one!

So this brings me to my last point of the post now, and that is... I don't want to spend the whole year waiting for Alex to come home. It is going to make for a miserable year if I do that to myself. I have so many things available to me and we even live close enough to the hospital that Alex can walk so I can have the car! I've come up with a lot of hobbies and things to keep me busy and happy while I'm not chasing the boys around. So basically, unless I have a legitimate reason to be miserable, I'm not going to wish this year away. I'm going to try to make the most of this year and be excited about Alex's rotations and the new things he's learning about medicine and himself! I have so much to be grateful for and we are going to like it here in Joplin. We have already had fun being here and have made friends, and I'd love to say at the end of this year that I accomplished some awesome goals. Here's a few I want to be working on in the long run...
1. Gardening and Food Storage
2. Sight Singing and Piano
3. Family History and Temple Work
4. Sewing (quilt for my bed)
5. Cake Decorating and Floral Arrangements
Plus on top of that I have had a desire to further my education since I never actually earned my bachelors in college, so I have some awesome textbooks I can be reading and studying to ready myself for when that time might present itself again. Awesome goals, right!? Hopefully I can attempt to keep up with the boys, let alone do all of these things. But the goal is not to accomplish them all this year, but to further myself in these directions. I hope I can report good things this next year!