Sage is a TEEN!

My Sweet girl Sage has had her birthday today and is now beginning an important period in her life. She is already a lovely girl and I can imagine her continuing her present successes into the future. She is a good student as reported by all of her teachers and she is almost always found reading on her bed. She is studying violin and is starting to have a lot of fun playing with me on the Piano or with Ainsley on her Cello. Her sisters and brother love to play games and have fun with her. I love how she is a willing helper and gets up and ready for school independantly. She is hard working and dependable and I am so grateful to be her mother.

Next month she and Ainsley will travel to Belgium and France with the youth from church. It was fun to renew her passport photo and see how much she has changed over the past five years.
We love you Sage!

Running in the rain lately

Hello my dears. I have been a very naughty blogger and am way behind on recording the events of these past Autumn and Winter seasons. My excuse is that I started to work at the hospital in September 09 and have just been in my own student nurse world since then. Working as a nurse has been interesting and I feel another realm has opened up to me that I was not aware of before. I started working at a West London hospital on a Colo-Rectal/General Surgical Ward. Before I could say cholycystectomy I was removing catheters, nasal gastric tubes and cannulas from our lovely post op patients. I was able to stand in theatre watching bowel surgery up close and personal. I have the utmost respect for the multi-professional teams that make surgery safe and possible. Working on this ward has also helped me to reinforce my healthy eating and lifestyle habits. I do not ever want surgery however 'safe' it may be:-)
At the beginning of February I started to jog with a friend. She has run marathons before and is at a greater fitness level I should say. She has been fabulous at encouraging me, showing up in the rain and generally being a great running buddy. This past week I had a wonderful breakthrough: I can now run over two miles without stopping to walk at all. I run with her three times a week at the moment and want to increase that to four times starting next week if possible. I think I shall need to go on my own a couple of times due to my early schedule at my new placement. I finished at the Hospital and now am at a residential home for people with epilepsy and learning disabilities. I love this place. I am enjoying seeing the world from someone else's very different viewpoint. I love how accepting the service users are and how much fun we all have during the day. Best of all it is a lot like what I do with my own family so I already feel like I am good at it. I have learned to start peg feeds, administer meds into pegs and to use music and touch to help calm someone. I am presently working with a young man who is autistic and has epilepsy. He seemed very easy to care for until the end of the first day, he had a siezure and afterwards started running at full speed and we couldn't get him to stop. He was in the zone!- and he ran outside in his socks. It is rainy and muddy this past week. He eventually was ready to stop and was ok but I can see how some would consider this challenging behaviour. Hope to catch up more soon.