News of a general sort

Since it has been some time since I posted, I thought I update you, my faithful reader(s), on the general household news. Mainly this is a ploy to put off cleaning the bunny cage, which is reaching critical mass as we speak. But anyway. *cough cough*

I passed my CNA test and am now a board-certified Certified Nursing Assistant. Whoopty-do! It's a requirement for nursing school, so I had to do it. I looked into an on-call job at one of the area hospitals in the mental health unit just for grins, and it pays to start about what I make working on-call in residential mental health. But goes up from there, whereas I am about topped out in residential. Something to think about.

Speaking of nursing school, I am crossing my fingers that I will be receiving a letter in about a month, telling me I've been accepted into the program that starts in January. I had been all in a lather about getting my transcript to the college in time for selection (April 1st) and then gotten this confusing letter from the Credential Evaluation dept., so I called them to clarify (all was well, no reason to panic) and then asked them oh so casually about my points... I was told by advising that I had 46 (out of 53) and just wanted to confirm this. The friendly and helpful young lady on the phone asked which class they had used to figure up this or that point total etc, and it turned out that I actually have 49 points. Oh, she says, you stand a good chance this time!

So yeah. The mailbox. Haunting. Every day. Even though the theoretical letter wouldn't come for another month or so.

Okay, so you know all the hoopla about the terrible two's and how awful they are? Don't you believe it! The terrible two's got nothing on the almost-3's. Suddenly everything we do is a struggle -- "Baby, come get dressed, we have to leave soon." (Baby runs down the hall laughing. I pursue and capture. Baby cries angrily and kicks her feet. Repeat ad nauseum.) "Baby, come eat your lunch." (Baby refuses and has a tantrum, then demands chocolate milk.) "Baby, don't pull the cat's fur." (Baby then kicks at cat, usually missing, but still.)

Mainly it's the refusal to cooperate when I'm trying to get her out the door that really fries me. Then once we are out she's generally fine. It's just dirty and wrong.

Another fun tradition: lingering in doorways. Like, throwing open the door exposes a brand new world so exciting and beautiful that she can't take it all in and must move so-o-o-o slo-o-o-o-owly as she exits the house (or wherever we are) that I trip over her and no amount of encouragement will expedite this process. This is especially fun at places where there might be others behind us waiting to leave also. Fortunately she is fairly adorable and most people's hearts explode as soon as they look upon her, so we get relatively few dirty looks. But still! Is it so hard to pick up your feet, little girl?!

Nice weather today, maybe I'll get to paint the shed ...

Shed! Bunnies! Helping!

J's brother is here building us a shed and doing various other jobs. He is a very skilled carpenter and has made us the cutest, snuggest little shed ever. As I blog this, he is out putting up gutters on the patio roof and the shed. He even built a little fence to keep the dogs away from the back fence! They like to go back there and bellow at the neighbors behind us, a practice that I find odious and beating-worthy. Alas, due to societal pressures not to inflict violence on others, am restricted to yelling and shaking my fist. Stupid non-violence.

We took the bunnies out yesterday for their first ever lawn excursion! The wire enclosure is finally free for use since it is no longer serving as our hillbilly gate (as J's brother crafted two wonderful gates for us his first day here). They were unhappy about how much J's brother's dog Busty wanted to eat them -- he was literally drooling as he watched them -- but seemed to enjoy the grass and the sun and all that.



Note the ugly bald patch on Exidor's back. It has started to grow back since we began putting more toys in the cage, so I'm pretty sure it was just that Cleo was grooming it off of him. She's very energetic.



The baby wanted to help so J's brother let her do various things. He's really great with kids. She also wanted to play with her bunnies so we let her be in with them for a few minutes. Tempting as it is, we do not generally keep her in a pen.... Note the shed in background. It will be painted a lovely green with blue trim, since trying to match it with the house didn't really work out. The siding on the house is nice but as a paint color, it would have been a murky blueish-gray. Ick. So J said I could paint it as I like! She is both kind and brave. There is a ladder rack on the long side against the fence, and there will be a 2x2' window on the long side in the photo. J's brother has a place he likes to get them for cheap so he roughed in the hole and he'll just saw out the siding and put the window in next time he's here.

Three more days of CNA class and then the board exam is the 21st of this month. Yay!

Clarification

To clarify previous post, I have 46 points as of this evaluation. The other points from the CNA course and the third term of A&P will not count for this evaluation since they will not be completed by last Sunday.

Am now haunting mailbox despite how utterly unrealistic it is to expect any news this early.

Nurst

Okay, so we calculated my nursing school admission requirement points as of the end of last term. I have 46 out of 53. Gaining my certification as a nursing assistant gives me four more points, and getting an A next term would bring me up all the way to the full 53.

J showed me the statistics about admission points for the past couple of evaluation periods and 100% of applicants with 46 points and above were admitted, in both periods. A fairly decent percentage (40ish, 50ish) of applicants with either 44 or 43 and above were admitted. The tiebreaking factor is a log-in date of application and I am not sure where my log-in date stands compared to others.

At any rate, it looks like I'm in... I should know in a week or two. I would start Winter term (January 2008).

GAAAAAAAAH!

The Milton Flip

Okay, so I started Certified Nursing Assistant training this week. I'm taking it at a small, homey trade school with a fantastic success rate, run by an "I'm everybody's grandma" type woman who used to be a tester for the certification board so she clearly knows what she's doing.

The school is housed in a former cheap motel that has been converted to offices and is decorated in Middle America I Shop At Wal-Mart And Believe That Scented Candles And Tabletop Fountains Are The Height Of Home Decor. Seriously, you walk in the door and --I'm so not making this up -- there is a scented candle AND a tabletop fountain going in EVERY ROOM. Including both bathrooms. Incidentally, there is a Wal-Mart literally across the street.

We started right in with the pleasantries: Hi how are you, here's your packet, watch this industrial film about The Role Of The Certified Nursing Assistant ("Not Just A Glorified Lackey, But Also One Who Makes 25 Cents an Hour More Than An Uncertified Nursing Assistant"), and then let's learn peri-care on this (also not making this up but wish I was) anatomically correct mannequin.

Peri-care, for those of you fortunate enough not to know, means perineal care. Perineal means "extremely personal private regions south of your belt buckle." The east 40 and the west 40. The whole damn enchilada. Or taquito.

(Disclaimer: Now, I'm writing this from the part of me that is still reeling from having to think about cleaning anyone's goodies but my own, and of course the baby's. The higher-functioning, future-nurse part of my brain has already moved on to more sensible ways of thinking, along the lines of, it's all just anatomy, input/output, part of the patient, needs to be dealt with discreetly and compassionately, etc. etc. But that junior-high eeeeeeuw! corner of my inner self is writing this currently, so rest assured that I will not betray or acknowledge any part of this as the nurse I will become. Honestly, I was in the hospital for 48 hours and gave birth in front of other people, some of them total strangers, and then sat there joking with the person who sewed up the damages, so this is really not a big deal. Except that I must bring it to you, my faithful reader(s), in shocking detail, for full dramatic and humorous effect. /End Disclaimer)

So, after introductions were made and the recent yet gloriously dated film was watched, we trooped down the hall and a very pretty, very fashionable, very young woman demonstrated peri-care on the aforementioned mannequin. Between the homey-yet-stagey setting and the harsh lighting, I felt as if someone would be coming by later after closing, perhaps to film some amateur porn. We were introduced to the mannequin "Billy" and shown how to give Billy's junk a bit of a wash. Yeah. Junk. Junk that can be swapped out for male junk with a mere riiiiip of velcro. Voila! Billy becomes Bill! Whichever bit of junk not in use is stored in a handy compartment in the abdomen.

Did I mention that the class that started on Monday consisted of me and two men? Uh-huh. Um, yay?

One of those men is a really nice guy who is a very young father of six with no. 7 on the way. I like him and he's smart and polite and clearly got his head on straight, other than evidently not fully understanding where babies come from.

The other man? That would be Milton.

If you are familiar with the actor Jerry Van Dyke, you may understand this reference: if Luther Van Damme went to CNA school, he'd be Milton.

Yeah, that peri-care thing? Should have taken each of us, with coaching from the instructor and the usual studently ineptitude and dumb questions, around ten minutes. Milton volunteered to be first and half an hour later he finally managed to complete the task and let the next person give it a shot. The real sticking point had to do with how to fold a washrag into a sort of a mitt on your hand and thereby create several surfaces that can each be used once on an area. Then part of the mitt is flipped over your (latex-gloved) fingers to expose a new clean area. This flip part, really more of a pulling-over, became a total ordeal. I thought the instructor was either going to throw down her clipboard and take up strong drink or else start looking around for hidden cameras. You'd have thought Milton was reviewing a complicated brain-surgery technique from the excruciating and repetitive detail he went into to try to master this skill. I am pretty sure the dummy was about to lunge off the bed and strangle him with his/her stiff, rubbery hands if he'd gone on much longer about it.

So now when I'm practicing any kind of washing skill (peri- or otherwise) I secretly call it "the Milton Flip" when I pull the washrag-mitt over my fingers to expose a clean surface.