NP Conference, Etc.

I'm in the weird vacuum of a professional conference - the sort of time-warp where days start to blend together and you get to know all the obscure restrooms in odd corners of the conference center, and we're not even staying at the conference hotel.

We drove down late Wednesday night, after our first dinner with the brand new stove. Unfortunately it was just quick spaghetti and broccoli, the oven was unused other than the 30 minute trial after installation. We also have a new dishwasher, which, if all goes well, will not flood the kitchen on its maiden voyage.

Mom/Oma made us a reservation at the Sleep Inn; she was due for another of her injections for macular degeneration and her eye usually bothers her for a few days afterwards, so the hotel seemed to be a good alternative to having four house guests and feeling miserable after an injection to her eye.

Thursday we came to the conference center at National Harbor so I could register and check out where things were. Most of the attendees had gone to Capitol Hill for visits with their states' representatives, so it was pretty empty. The Gaylord is very nice, though grossly overpriced (bottle of water $3.00; large cup of coffee and a plain croissant $7.00). I feel sorry for those actually staying here because there is no easy access to a Wawa or grocery store - I could make a killing by bringing in provisions for people or shuttling them to the supermarket if I were so inclined.

The Sleep Inn has an indoor pool, which is nice if the weather is bad. Micah seems to love it; Thea had a slip and dunk in the whirlpool so she's a little water shy. Yesterday was day one of the 'real' part of the conference so Steve had to entertain both for the entire day - and I stayed for the 5:30 performance of the Capitol Steps, which was funny and fabulous. I think I saw them almost 20 years ago at another conference and they were just as hilarious then. Imagine a Robin Williams-ish rapid fire wit with a political bent.

Anyway, I'm sitting around waiting for the exhibit hall to open at 6:00pm. Both the sessions I went to yesterday and the ones today were really good; it's nice to feel somewhat energized and enlightened. Steve and the kids will be coming down and we'll have dinner later on.

Sorry this one is mostly about me, me, me.

L.

PS: On the Wednesday before we left for Maryland, in addition to the new stove and dishwasher being delivered and installed, going to Sound Beginnings with Micah in the morning, we also met with a speech pathologist to have Micah evaluated. He's more or less on track for sounds that he should be producing at this age, but she'd like to see more spontaneous production of language rather than response to our prompting, so she'll be seeing him for an hour a week for awhile.

One month later. . . .

It's been almost a month since I last wrote anything here - I've written numerous witty, amusing posts in my head that have never survived long enough to be typed into the computer.

At work we've moved into the world of the EMR, electronic medical record, so now in addition to my prescription pad, stethoscope and PDA, I drag a laptop along with me into the exam room. It's been an interesting transition, and I'm not sure whether I love it or hate or am somewhere in between, but I do know that I am so bleeping tired of hearing "It's going to be great, eventually. . . ." The amount of time I now spend on the computer at work definitely lessens the amount of time I spend on the computer at home. And yesterday I found out that the additional time we get in our schedules to catch up is going to be phased out over the next few months. It's definitely making me think that if I ever move to another practice, it had better be one so small, poor or non-profit so as never to be able to afford instituting an EMR system. There is something so much more deliberate in writing down what one did and said rather than ticking off a bunch of boxes.

Meanwhile and far away, we've made another trip to Washington last weekend, Thea finished up Pre-K and will be starting summer camp next week, Micah is going to be evaluated next week by a speech pathologist to see if he has any other impediments to acquiring and producing speech other than his hearing impairment, the kids are going in for their check-ups Monday and Monday evening our social worker will be making a visit to be able to write up our 12-month post-placement report for Micah, which will officially end our relationship with the adoption agency and is a cause for celebration since there isn't a whole lotta love flowing in either direction. (Fortunately, we love our social worker - she's not affiliated with the adopton agency.)

Two weeks ago on the 6th, in the midst of that hot spell, the kids and I went to Target to get a pump to inflate the pool we got from Aunt Shannon last year - and upon opening it discovered that the pump had to be charged for ten hours before using. So we hauled out the pump that came with the pool. Whether due to the heat, general crabbiness or just because, Thea and Micah fought like badgers in a sack over pumping so we resorted to ten pumps for one, then ten for the other - and if you've seen the size of this pool, it was going to take a lot of pumping to get it anywhere close to blown up. I was ready to lose it because Micah wanted to 'drive' the pump (spin the pump handle) rather than contribute to the cause, so I said to him, "Micah, I am going to kill you." Which passed unnoticed, until Thea piped up, "And if you get up, she'll kill you again." Fortunately after an hour of torture, the pool was up and ready to be filled. The down side is that once in the pool, it's hard to get Micah out, even when his lips start to acqure a purple-y blue tinge from cold. I had to lure then to the front lawn with a promise of bubble goop and chalk to get them out of the water.