Toads-in-the-Hole

It’s a busy week here in Toadsland. We’ve begun rehearsals for the Vermillion Community Theatre summer show Damn Yankees, Aimee has a unit exam (completed successfully 9 hours ago, yay!) and her final exam for nursing school on Wednesday, and I have Step I of my medical licensing board exam on Friday. And, as it turns out, we’re still parents of an infant who is now seven weeks old.
Parenting while studying works pretty well:

And when Adelaide demands a little more attention, we’ve figured out ways to hold and comfort her while simultaneously reading or grinding through a practice exam on the computer. No, make no mistake, this is not a “I can’t do all that I want because I have a baby” post, though I’m sure we’ll have a few of those coming up. In fact, having Adelaide around in some ways makes me study harder. I’m certainly less able to participate in, say, a distracting game of soccer while cradling Adelaide to my chest. Unless maybe I was to play goalkeeper. And I certainly can’t spend more than a few minutes composing a weblog entry, or playing a computer game, or cleaning the house, as all these require two hands. And then there’s the whole priorities thing. Sometimes when I’m sick of studying, I’ll look at Adelaide and think, “In order to be good with her I need to be happy. And kicking the crap out of this exam will make me happy,” and then I’ll go back to work.
Soon, though, so soon I can almost hear it, like you can hear the future sudden silence a train will bring after its passing while still being bathed in its clamor, we will be done. Aimee will walk across the stage on Saturday to receive her diploma. I will be finished with the academic years of my training. And, like swords beat into plowshares, the review books will be put to better uses.

P.S. If you have a moment, pay a visit and say hello to the two newest weblogs on our sidebar! Doug (my father) has a "plog" attached to the Amazon entry of his recently published book about antenna engineering in which he talks very little about antennas and quite a bit about what it's like to have a hobby farm in north central Minnesota. And, for something completely different, Roman Numeral J, the weblog of our buddy Joel Seeger in which he often talks about the subject of his soon-to-be-complete master's thesis: Zombies.