Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

This is a letter written to Glo at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic. Mommy suggested we post our letters to her on the blog so that some day, our descendants could know what Coronavirus was like for us. Hi Globeegirl! How ya been? Any strange cough suddenly overtaken you? Running a high fever? If you answered no, you probably don't have Coronavirus, which is the only thing anyone has been discussing lately. Granted, it is a nice change from the presidential elections, but still. It only took a worldwide pandemic for BYU to finally give us a spring break. Yes, that's right. On Thursday, BYU announced that classes for the next three days(Friday, Monday, and Tuesday) would be cancelled, and classes would resume on Wednesday, but online. That certainly threw some professors for a loop. I've been getting all these emails about how we are going to structure the class now that we are moving to an online setting. ON the bright side, that means that classes are no longer s

Dear Glo, I wanted to tell you about an experience I had the other day on labor and delivery.  I don't think I told you on the phone, if I did forgive me, I just felt like I should tell you. So, I was covering emergency labor and delivery  on Tuesday morning from 7-12 .  I had been hanging around waiting for anything to happen  from 7:00 to 9:30  and nothing was happening so I went down stairs to my boss's office to talk to her. I was sitting there  at 9:34  and I got a call from labor and delivery that a person in the waiting area had a ruptured uterus and we had to rush her back for an emergency cesarean section.  I got up, ran down two halls, ran up three flights of stairs, ran to the OR and the patient was laying on the bed and they were getting her ready for a c/s. We had to do an intubation to put her to sleep because it was an emergency.  They could not tell if they could hear the baby's heartbeat on the monitor in the room.  So I got my hat, my mask and

I’m sitting here on a Sunday afternoon, feeling COMPLETELY antsy. Dieting doesn’t help that at all, because Sundays is usually a HUGE snacking day for me, but the antsiness has been going on for a couple days now, so it’s not limited to today. I think the heart of it all really is this crazy ridiculous pandemic situation in which we find ourselves. I imagine in 20 years we will look back and it will be crazy what our normal is right now, although I could see some things changing in society because of all of this. So I wanted to just take a chance to express some of the thoughts I have, both good and bad, about life right now. For anyone who reads this, please feel free to edit or comment below with your own feelings about things. I’m going to go pro-con, pro-con, just so that I don’t sink into a deep pit of despair and misery and go into how unhappy all of this could make me. Pro #1: Spending more time with my family. In “normal times,” I have an hour and a half commute, one way, to

COVID-19.  I wonder if my descendants will wonder someday what it was like for the world and specifically our family when they hear about the coronavirus.  It has created a very new normal/abnormal for many people, and it will take us a very long time to recover from all of it. For John and me, the advent of COVID-19 coincided exactly with our lives turning around.  In January, after 14 long months of not having a job, John began working in PA, pulling call on weekends.  Then, in the beginning of February, he started a new job in Dearborn, working for the OB/Gyn residency at Beaumont. This was after 14 months of not working.  Our last pay check had come in September of 2019, so we had been without a pay check for four solid months.  We had about $40,000 in savings, but it was gone by the end of November. Because we had a short sale on our PA house in 2018, and he hadn't been the requisite two years since in order to clear our record, nobody would give us a mortgage....except

Seeing as this time in our lives is rather unprecedented, I wanted to record exactly how it goes. Our days are pretty much the same old thing everyday, but I seriously love it because Ethan and the family are here along with Hannah.  Let me see if I can describe them a bit. John leaves between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m.  It just depends on what he's covering for the day.  Ethan comes into our room to get to the office around 8:00.  That usually wakes me up.  Plus, the babies are usually up by then.  They have breakfast, and Baby usually struggles to get through her cereal :-) Somebody takes out the dogs, and by this time, Hannah is hopefully up, or else Hootie is driving us crazy, begging to be fed. While they are eating breakfast, Ethan and I do the daily Washington Post crossword together.  Yes, he has  such  a hard job..... We have gotten 750 every single day, so we looked up how to earn more points.  Today we scored 850 so we were pretty stoked! Also, Ethan freque

Leading up to this spring's General Conference, our prophet, President Nelson, asked us to prepare--to read Joseph Smith's account of the First Vision, and to think what our life would be like without the restoration.  I've taken this seriously, and to be honest, many of my thoughts throughout any given day have turned to these two things. Today, during the morning session of General Conference, President Nelson read to us, from the Sacred Grove, the sixth proclamation ever given by the first presidency.  It was a beautiful reminder of how much has happened since the church and the priesthood were restored on the earth.  Afterwards, in an almost empty auditorium, with all of the general authorities sitting six feet apart in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic, President Nelson led us in the Hosanna shout from the podium.  It was followed by the Hosanna anthem being sung by the Tabernacle Choir and the audience joining with The Spirit of God (a very sweet reminder of wh

We needed to get out of the house and stop unpacking boxes! Looking at the nice weather for the weekend, I knew that a lighthouse tour would be just the ticket.  I decided to stick with the tour that John and I took last Fall, but we just started at the beginning and waited to see how far we got during the day.  It was perfect! Everyone was almost  ready by our 8:30 starting time.  I decided at the last minute that we would pack a lunch (instead of risking more points of contamination) so that took some extra time, and we got on the road at 9:00. One of the ongoing jokes in the family at the moment is John's "free solo!"  When we had the leather couches in the apartment, John didn't want to wait to lower the footrest so he would grab the adjoining half-wall and pull himself up.  It's a nod to Alex Honnold in the National Geographic movie, "Free Solo" who climbed El Capitan in Yosemite.  Now, with several on us at any one time on a couch, it's a b