Spaghetti-fest

Rebecca got to enjoy a lovely meal of spaghetti (actually, it was bucatelli) and meatballs with marinara sauce and parmesan cheese for dinner tonight. Fortunately, mama had the foresight to strip her naked beforehand so as to limit the mess (although I have a higher tolerance for a mess than Ramy, I handle laundry stains, so I draw the line there).

Oh yeah, in case anyone is wondering - it took 9 hand and face wipes to clean her off enough to get her out of the highchair. And then she got a bath immediately afterwards.

New features

I added a slideshow of all the pics from our photo shoot at the beach. It's over there to the right somewhere.

Also, there is now a feature at the bottom of the page that allows you to subscribe to my blog. It will notify you when there is an update.

Progress!!!!

I've been working nonstop for the past few days since my mom left. And progress has been made!

I got word last week that I'd received IRB approval for my dissertation study.

I finished my comp paper today and turned it in this afternoon. Woo hoo!!!! (Or as Rebecca is so fond of saying, "Hoo WAY!" So now it is in the hands of Dr. Vermeersch, who may or may not even read the darn thing, and one other reviewer. Once they pass on it, then I'm considered to have officially advanced to candidacy for the doctoral degree.

I also met with the staff at the University of Redlands Counseling Center, where I'll be collecting my data. We worked out all the final little details and logistics. Everything is set for the study to commence. We'll begin collecting data next week when school starts for them. I'm sure there will be hiccups along the way and kinks to work out, but it is good to know that the study is off the ground. I just have to set up the website for the collection of the data for a supplemental survey I'm having participants do online. I actually did that tonight in my religion class, so now I just need to test it and make sure it is actually collecting the data.

This morning, I went in to Casa Colina for a couple of hours to finish up some work on some reports I've been working on the last couple of days at work. It is fast-paced there, and there just isn't enough time to see all the patients, interview them, administer the tests, score and interpret them, and get the reports written up in the time allotted. Especially on the inpatient unit where there is so much extra chaos (like the patient I saw this week who remained in a fetal position with a blanket over her head throughout the evaluation).

So I'm feeling really great about all the progress I've made this week. Now I just have to get my dissertation proposal done. Mostly, it is written and just has to be assembled. The introduction will come straight from my comp paper. The methods and plan for statistical analyses were done for the IRB proposal. I have all my committee contacted and agreeable to be on my committee, and they're all full time in the department (or at U of R), so I don't anticipate too much difficulty scheduling. I hope it can be before fall quarter starts. That will give me approximately 6-8 weeks in which I don't have to do anything but work on my applications for internship (and the class I'm TAing...and the two classes I'm taking...and my work at Casa Colina).

The one downer is that I dropped my cell phone in a sink of water this afternoon. I've got the battery out and it is drying out, so hopefully it won't be dead on me. I love my new cell phone!!!

Our little model

My mom and I are working on some custom outfits that are made to match Gymboree clothing lines as a way of feeding into our love of dressing up Rebecca like she's a little doll. We will be selling them on Etsy and some other sites that are specific to lovers of children's clothes. Of course Rebecca is our model. We took some pictures of her to use on the site, modeling the clothes. We'll be adding more as new Gymboree lines come out, and we'll probably also do some customs for the holidays.
Check these out:





I will update on my mom's visit soon. Right now, I'm just completely swamped with work at Casa Colina, my religion class, and trying to get things ready to launch my dissertation study, submitting my comp, getting ready to propose, and internship stuff.

Pictures on the beach

We had pictures taken on the beach today in Laguna Beach. Here are a few:

A girl and her dog

Rebecca absolutely loves our dog (a pound puppy) Sydney. Actually, she loves both Sydney and Paddington, but Sydney is a little more willing to lay still and let Rebecca hug her, pat her, and lay down with her on the dog bed. Paddy Boy is still a little more spastic. Plus, he has been known to steal Rebecca's food, and I think she holds that against him. And I think he holds it against her that she yells at him for doing so.

Here's a series of pics I took of Rebecca talking to, loving, and playing with Sydney.

Birthday weekend

We spent most of this weekend celebrating Ramy's birthday. Okay, well, that's how I thought of it, but to be honest, I think he forgot it was his birthday at least half of Friday and after that was over the birthday thing. But that's how unassuming my Ramy is. Again, we're total opposites in that regard. I play up the fact that my birthday is a national holiday one seventh of the time, and he never remembers that his birthday is in fact a holy day of obligation. Speaking of which, we were in a state of mortal sin for not going to mass on the day of obligation, but we went today, so hopefully we're okay.

Ramy came home at lunch on Friday, even though it wasn't his 9/80, so Rebecca and I got to meet him after we got out of Gymboree for a birthday lunch and then Ramy got his car washed. And then we all went to Costco (it's like a day without sunshine if we don't go to Costco). Friday night, we went out to dinner in Claremont with Rourke, her new boyfriend Evan (also a PD), Ana, and Simon. We had a blast, and Rebecca was in rare form performing for new admirers. Ana and Simon are expecting a baby boy around Christmas. Evan and Rourke have been dating a few months now, and Ana and I wanted the dirt on how it is going with the. I think we were all on our best behavior, so I don't think we scared him off or anything.

Saturday, we went to breakfast at Carrows. Rebecca had a diaper blowout, and we hadn't brought a change of clothes, so we went back home to change. By that time, she was ready for a nap (and so was Ramy). We went to shop for Ramy's birthday present (2 new pairs of dress shoes) and some pajamas for Rebecca (since she's such a hot baby, she will need shorty pajamas for fall, and they won't be out much longer. Then we came home and watched the Olympics.

This morning, we went to 7:30 mass, got breakfast, and came home and relaxed. We attempted to get Rebecca to take a nap this morning, but she was far more intersted in other things. We met Ramy's mom and one of his sisters and her family for brunch at Marie Callendar's, and Rebecca again enjoyed putting on a show. She's become a real ham lately. She loved looking at her cousin Jessica (age 12), admiring Jessica's long hair and her dress, picking up Jessica's purse, and bringing a book to Jessica to get her to read it to her. Rebecca so wants to be a big girl!

I have a religion midterm on Tuesday evening, so I should probably do something to prepare for that. But I have to admit that I probably will do very little. I think, after 25 years of school, I've reached the point where it wouldn't devastate me if I only got a B. But it might say something bad about me if the worst grade I ever got in grad school was in a religion class. I am planning to finish my comp paper this week before my mom arrives. Woo hoo!

A prayer request: Please keep Lisa Grubbs and family in your prayers. I think I mentioned her on here before. She has been diagnosed with metastatic colorectal cancer and will be undergoing chemo and radiation for six weeks at MD Anderson, surgery, and then six more months of chemo. She has four little boys at home too, which makes everything more complicated. Her mom is my second mother Joy (for those of you trying to figure out who I'm talking about).

Happy Birthday, Ramy/Daddy!

Today (Friday) is Ramy's birthday. I wish that in my little collage of pictures above that I could show you all two of my favorite pictures of Ramy, but I don't have scanned images of them. One of them is a picture of him when he and his family first arrived in the United States. He is just about the tiniest and cutest little thing you've ever seen. My other favorite is on our refrigerator and people tend to not believe that it's Ramy when they see it. It was taken in the 80s, and he is a teenager practicing his Bruce Lee imitation and looking quite buff and sporting an odd looking mustache. Of course, when that picture was taken, I was still a toddler, a fact which I like to bring up to him all the time to make him feel like a dirty old man. I just wish there were more pics of him during his baby and toddler year, because I'd love to compare those pics to ones of Rebecca.

I was going to write a really mushy post about how wonderful he is and how much I love him, but I know that it would completely mortify him for me to put that stuff on here. In fact, even though we're celebrating his birthday with some of his best friends this weekend, they aren't allowed to even know that it is his birthday we're celebrating. They just think we're getting together. It would be a travesty for him to be the center of attention (lordy, we're so different!), and the worst possible scenario would be if they sang Happy Birthday to him. But I'll just say that there's something pretty telling about the fact that his birthday is a Holy Day in the Catholic Church. Now God wouldn't have just regular ordinary guys to be born on a Holy Day, now would He?

Ramy's dad had this poem, and it has always been really special to Ramy and it is one of the few sentimental things that he has kept for years. There's no one Ramy has looked up to more than his dad (whose birthday was this past Monday), and I know his dad believed that Ramy fulfilled all the the words of this poem.

Build Me a Son
Written by General Douglas A. MacArthur

Build me a son, O Lord,
who will be strong enough to know when he is weak,
and brave enough to face him self when he is afraid;
one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat,
and humble and gentle in victory.

Build me a son whose wishbone will not be
where his backbone should be;
a son who will know Thee- and that
to know himself is the foundation stone of knowledge.

Lead him, I pray, not in the path of ease and comfort,
but under the stress and spur of difficulties and challenge.
Here, let him learn to stand up in the storm;
here, let him team compassion for those who fall.

Build me a son whose heart will be clear, whose goals will be high;
a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men;
one who will learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep;
one who will reach into the future, yet never forget the past.

And after all these things are his,
add, I pray, enough of a sense of humor,
so that he may always be serious,
yet never take himself too seriously.

Give him humility, so that he may always remember
the simplicity of true greatness,
the open mind of true wisdom,
the meekness of true strength.

Then I, his father, will dare to whisper,
"I have not lived in vain."

Another sleeping pic

Yeah, I know I post a lot of pics of Rebecca sleeping, but I just love to look at her when she is snoozing. She's a big fan of relaxing with her arms folded behind her head. On the mornings when I am going to Casa Colina, I get up before Ramy. Rebecca usually wakes up about the time he gets up, and she likes to relax in our bed and watch television. This morning, Ramy and I were both getting dressed, and we got such a kick out of watching Rebecca, propped up on a mountain of pillows with her arms behind her head, the sheet tucked under her armpits, watching The Wiggles, and grinning as though she didn't have a care in the world. She has a talent at making herself completely comfortable.

Rebecca is currently obsessed with the Baby Einstein animal flash cards that she got sometime back. She recently discovered them again, after they had been in her bookshelf for awhile. She loves to go through them, look at the pictures, point to the animal and say to me, "Whassat, Mama?" and then pretend to read the info on the back of the card, before she tosses the card over her shoulder and goes on to the next one. She is also far more interested in telling me what sounds the animals make than in repeating the name of the animal to me. She's been enjoying fresh strawberries these last few days too - I think she has eaten about a quart of them since the weekend. I made her some chicken vegetable noodle soup on Monday, and she is funny when we feed it to her. She follows up the first bite with a loud, "MMMMMMMMMmmmmmmm!" What a funny girl she is.

I was at Casa Colina yesterday and today. I saw three patients yesterday on the inpatient unit and did brief neuropsych screens (2 hours of neuro tests) on them. I had a very lovely gentleman use a few expletives to tell me that he had absolutely no interest in learning about how his brain was working, because he knew his memory was less than stellar, and his doctors knew his brain was...uh, not functioning at its most efficient. I paraphrased, of course, and used words that are a little more accepted in polite society, but that was the gist of what he was telling me. Of course, this was only after he had just told me that the current year was 1982, that the season we were currently in was winter, and that we were located in Idaho, which had been immediately preceded by him telling me that he hadn't noticed any changes in his memory or thinking abilities since his injury and that he did a lot of speed in his younger days. Thankfully, my other two were not only cooperative but motivated! You never know what you're going to walk into on the inpatient unit - last week, a patient I was testing started spitting on the floor in the middle of the interview. Then today I was doing intermediary assessments (3-5 hours of testing) at the Transitional Living Center. The patients there are medically stable and are generally getting ready to go home and are just learning how to live with their new disability or are getting more hours of daily therapy than you get in outpatient. So there is less kookiness, but often incredibly interesting injuries and sets of deficits. Last week, I tested a guy whose injury to his brain left him so that he didn't recognize anything that was processed by his left hemisphere (so anything on the right side of his body or seen with his right eye). If he looked at his right arm, he had no idea it was his. By the time I saw him, he'd been taught skills to compensate for that lack of processing somewhat, but when I asked him to draw a circle, he drew a perfect half circle, leaving off the right half. That's something you don't see every day!

The most important thing I've learned thus far in this neuropsych experience is that you shouldn't ever damage your brain. Okay, folks? It will prevent a lot of bad stuff and hours of testing with someone like me.

My religion class is completely heinous. I'm tired of being in exile and I hope we all get to the Promised Land soon. The names of all the different kings (Josiah, Ammon, Hezzekiah...) were in my dream last night. Luckily, I have found a way to get onto the internet in our classroom, although we're only supposed to be able to access the intranet over the wi-fi. I will admit that although it appears that I'm taking notes on the septuagint and the dietary laws written about in Deuteronomy while I'm typing away on my laptop, I'm really shopping on BabyGap.com, looking for college friends on Facebook, and transferring money from one bank account to another. Luckily, I only have 5 more classes to go!

Talkin' on the phone

Rebecca loves to walk around with the phone in hand. She will carry it around and then mutter to the phone (I suppose that is what she thinks I am doing) and then burst out into laughter. However, if there is actually someone on the phone, then she mostly just stares at the phone (probably trying to figure out how to get Grammy or Daddy or whoever out of the little box) or smiles and lays her head on the phone as if she is loving on it. She's also a big fan of pressing buttons, so she's apt to hang up on people abruptly.

Last night, Rebecca ate 14 strawberries for dinner and pretty much nothing else. As soon as she sees the container of strawberries, she exclaims, "MMMMMMmmmmmmmmm!" And then she freaks out wanting them in the few seconds it takes me to wash them and cut the end off. This morning, she wanted to eat my cereal for breakfast. Since I use skim milk and she needs whole milk (plus I don't want her to have artificial sweetener), I did a little bowl of multigrain cheerios with whole milk for her, while I had my rice chex in skim milk. That little stinker totally knew I was trying to fake her off! At first, she took bites of her cereal, but then she realized her bites were coming from a different bowl than mine. So then I tried getting a spoonful of hers and then dipping it down into my bowl. She fell for that a couple of times before she was on to my game. Finally, I poured her cereal into my bowl when I was done with mine and then took miniature bites of it (gag! whole milk is too white and too slimy!) and she would eat it a bit more then. But then she wanted to feed it to herself, which just didn't work too well. So I made up some greek yogurt for her with wheat germ and cinnamon in it and she ate about 1/2 cup of it and fed it all to herself. She is doing really well with using a spoon, so long as it isn't too runny. The greek yogurt is thicker than regular yogurt, so it is more conducive to toddler self-feeding. Plus it has a little more protein in it.

Rebecca goes to the pediatrician on Friday for her 18 month checkup. Wonder if she has gained any weight in the last 3 months. I really don't think so, although she may be a bit heavier to go along with the tiny bit taller she has gotten. Her fall wardrobe will be interesting, because she really still needs 3-6 month sizes in the waist but for fall she will need 12-18 month sizes for length. Thankfully Grammy can fix everything.

I am roasting a chicken in the crockpot downstairs, and it smells so good I can't even take it. I'm going to use it to make chicken spaghetti for dinner tonight and chicken vegetable noodle soup for lunches this week.

This is the recipe for chicken spaghetti:

2 cups cooked chicken (a store-bought rotisserie chicken works wonderfully, or roasted chicken breasts does great too)
1 chicken bouillon cube
2 cans cream of chicken soup (or 1 can cream of chicken, 1 can cream of mushroom - I use the healthy request that has less fat and sodium)
2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
1/4 cup diced red bell pepper
1 small red onion, diced
3 cups dried spaghetti, broken into 2-3 inch pieces
2 cups chicken broth (homemade is always better, but boxed/canned works fine too)
1 tsp. seasoned salt
1/8 to 1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper
Salt and pepper to taste
1 additional cup sharp cheddar cheese

Bring pot of water to boil. Add chicken bouillon cube and broken spaghetti. Cook according to package directions. Drain spaghetti and mix with remaining ingredients, other than the additional cheddar cheese. Cover and freeze up to six months; cover and refrigerate up to 2 days; or top with remaining cheese and bake immediately at 350°F for 45 minutes until bubbly. If cheese on top begins to get too brown, cover with foil.

Sunday afternoon nap

In an unsuccessful attempt to take a family nap, Naked Rebecca enjoyed playing around with Daddy's glasses, watch, and everything else she could find. I gave up on the nap concept myself, but now R&R are sleeping soundly in our room.



It has been a nice long weekend for us. Friday was Ramy's 9/80 day, so he was off. I actually had to go in to Casa Colina for about an hour on Friday morning, because I needed to talk to my supervisor at the TLC about how she does reports, because she is going to be out of town the next three weeks and I'll be flying solo. Then I met Ramy and Rebecca at Ramy's dad's nursing home. They were celebrating the start of the Olympics and having a party, so Rebecca got a balloon. Then she and I went to Gymboree, where Rebecca was the only little girl in attendance. It's so funny to see her in comparison to the boys, because they are all so much bigger than she is (not to mention rowdier). She had a blast as usual. She took a nap for us on the way home but not any longer, so we went to lunch at Islands. Friday night, we watched the opening ceremony of the Olympics and I took apart the fabric softener dispenser in the washing machine to see why it wasn't emptying properly (it was clogged with guck).

Yesterday morning, I got up to find a message of doom on the computer saying that the hard drive was about to crash. So I spent most of the day backing up the computer, buying an external hard drive, getting it set up, and trying to figure out what is wrong with the computer. I ran ScanDisk and it found no bad sectors. I uploaded the diagnostics stuff to Dell, and it says the computer is working fine. And indeed it does seem to be running normally. And yet, there's a flashing light on the screen telling me that it may bite it at any minute. Hopefully not since we've only had this computer for a year. Rebecca took a very nice long nap for us yesterday, which was delightful. Ramy took Sydney and Paddy to be groomed. In the afternoon, we took the truck to Pasadena to Maddie and Paul's house. Maddie needed an armoire moved to her sister's house, and we're the only people with a truck. So Ramy, Vincent, and Paul made like cute little Asian moving men and accomplished the deed, while Maddie and I played with the girls. Then we all went out for Mexican food.

So it's mostly been a weekend of home maintenance projects for us, but it's been so hot that we've been happy to stay indoors.

Computer problems

I awake this morning to a message of impending doom from my computer. Basically it said that our hard drive is about to fail. So I've spent the last couple of hours backing up all our files and pictures. I think part of the problem is all the pictures and digital scrapbooking files I have on the hard drive, so I'm going to get an external hard drive to move all those things onto. Then I can try to repair the hard drive. OR something like that. Hopefully it won't be something fatal. But if no updates for a few days, that's why.

Waiting for some religion

Okay, I'm not really waiting for religion, but I am basically hanging out at Loma Linda, waiting for my 6:00 Old Testament class. Have I mentioned on here that this class is kind of hard? I've spent a lot of time the last couple of weeks delving into the books of Amos and Genesis. I've also learned a lot about how many times and ways the books of the Old Testament have been arranged, rearranged, and decided upon throughout their history. I had learned a lot about that process by going through RCIA, but it is interesting to get more of a historical perspective on it. In case all you Protestants out there didn't know, we Catholics have extra books in our Bible that you all don't have. They're in the Old Testament and are referred to as the Apocrypha. Equally as importantly, because I already had a Catholic study bible, I didn't have to buy any books for this class. ;-) Does it make me a heathen that what I like about this class really has nothing to do with theology but is more the social, historical, and political context in which all of the events in the Old Testament occurred and those same factors that led to the inclusion or exclusion of such texts in what we think of as the Bible?

I had a rather interesting conversation with my dissertation chair today. By the way, the same guy who is the chair of my dissertation committee also happens to be my director clinical training and my academic advisor. So basically, he's the guy who will help me get out of here on every dimension, and he also happens to be a really great guy. I was talking to him about when I was going to propose my dissertation and who else I should ask to be on my committeee. For a Ph.D., you have to have five members on your dissertation committee. Obviously, your dissertation chair is the main person you work with, but then you've got to have all these other people, including one from outside your own department. Since I'm working with a psychologist at the University of Redlands to collect my data there, obviously she fills that role. But it is kind of a random thing as to who else to put on my committee, because no one else really does that kind of research. So he basically told me to pick these two people who happen to be more clinically-oriented in their research and who are full time faculty (which makes for easier scheduling for a proposal and a defense). Then he told me to ask our department chair, because he didn't want to ask anyone else because they might be harder to get along with and because our department chair would be a non-factor. I love it that my Ph.D. is going to all come down to the fact that my dissertation chair and I cherry picked my committee and stacked it with people who are kind of lazy and won't hold things up by asking for assinine statistical analyses and stuff like that. Let me be clear though that I really couldn't care less - all I want is the piece of lambskin so that I can legally add a few more initials behind my name. I'm happy to achieve that through the path of least resistance. I definitely made the right decision jumping ship to work with him instead of my old advisor (who, by the way, is not going to be on my committee at all).

As an update on some prayer requests I've asked you for in recent weeks:

My friend Julie had her baby girl Adelaide two weeks ago. She is a beauty and a champ at eating - she was back to her birthweight by the time she was 7 days old.

My aunt's surgery was today, and she came through fine. They were able to stent an artery supplying blood to the intestines and internal organs, which should allow sufficient blood flow to the area, even though there was another artery that was completely blocked and about which nothing could be done. Hopefully this will allow her to be more active and will relieve some symptoms she has been experiencing.

In case I haven't made it clear, please pray that all goes well with my dissertation and internship application process. If all goes according to plan, I should be finishing my comp paper in the next two weeks (right now it is about 65 pages and really lacks only the addition of a few supporting pieces of evidence and some word-sleuthing and polishing) and then proposing my dissertation within the next month. I'll be applying for internship in the fall, interviewing in January, and I'll hopefully find out that I matched successfully toward the end of February. I'll start that internship sometime between July of September of next year, and ideally I'll be able to defend my dissertation before starting internship. Then I have twelve months of the internship, but assuming all of these steps fall into place, my graduation and hooding date should be the third Sunday in June of 2010. So, specifically, please pray that my dissertation goes off without a hitch and that I get matched to an internship site (one that is close to our house, is prestigious, and that pays really well would be nice too).

Hairstyles by daddy

Rebecca and Ramy have a nice new tradition. Ramy gives Rebecca a bath at night, and then he plops her on the bathroom vanity and lets her look at herself in the mirror while he combs her hair and then they brush their teeth together. Rebecca really enjoys this. If he gets her ready in the morning, he repeats this process to brush her hair. She loves it. I'm not sure what it says that she enjoys looking at herself in the mirror so much!

It was a nice weekend for us, but it seemed to go by too quickly. Ramy came home early on Friday, because he had a doctor appointment in Loma Linda. Rebecca and I accompanied him and entertained ourselves in the empty lobby with a game of chase the toddler. After we left, we walked around Ontario Mills mall and had a completely un-nutritious dinner there. Saturday morning, we ate breakfast at Bravo Burger while the car was being washed next door. We saw my friend Raquel there (she was pregnant with triplets due a week after Rebecca - they were born at 25 weeks and all died), which was awkward but it was nice to see her. Then we ran around and dropped off dry cleaning, went to Costco, etc. Saturday evening, we ate at the new Yard House in the Shoppes at Chino Hills and then watched the movie Definitely, Maybe. It was a sweet movie, but not anything life-changing. We went to 7:30 mass yesterday morning, which was our priest Fr. Ken's last service with us. I wonder who we'll be getting to replace him. Hopefully someone who speaks fluent English. In the afternoon, we mostly hung out at home and that kind of thing. We ate breakfast at Panera Bread afterward, and Rebecca downed a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice, which later gave her a bad diaper rash. Nothing a little Desitin and Triple Paste couldn't handle though. Being the good wife that I am, I made Ramy a batch of cioppino yesterday evening, and he'll be eating on that while I'm in class a couple of nights this week.

I attempted to clean out Rebecca's chest of drawers this weekend. I got a bag full of clothes she has outgrown to donate to charity. I'll probably save most of her higher-end brands and may resell them. Or I may get lazy and donate those and take the tax writeoff.

I'm really enjoying my new position at Casa Colina. I'm there on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I'll be spending my Tuesdays doing testing in the inpatient unit - most of these people are either in after a traumatic brain injury or other really serious accident/illness and need a brief neuro exam/testing to define a new baseline or to compare with premorbid functioning. Or they are in on the Senior Evaluation Program, which is a multidisciplinary team that checks out seniors and determines if they are safe at home, what kinds of assistance they are in need of, etc. My role in that is mostly determining dementia and cognitive decline. As my supervisor said, "A lot of those assessments are ridiculous. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to tell you some of these older people have cognitive decline." On Wednesdays then, I'll be in the Transitional Living Center. This is still an inpatient unit, but these folks are adjusting to their lives with a disability generally. So I'll be doing full batteries of neuropsych testing to determine their status after the acute medical recovery has happened (in the regular inpatient unit, you can't really do that since a lot of those people have just awakened from a coma, are still on a lot of pain meds, etc). So it is a nice package of neuropsych experience overall, and I think it will make me much more marketable for internship.

Speaking of which, I'm almost finished with my comp paper. I think I'll be done with it this week. I'm still on track to propose my dissertation this month. Woo hoo! Then I can focus on internship applications for all of September and October. I think my fall schedule is going to be really nice too - I'll only be going to Loma Linda one day - Thursday. I'm going to take my other religion class this fall, and hopefully I can subsitute the advanced neuropsych assessment class for the one remaining class I still need in our department. I'll also be teaching the projective personality assessment lab again this fall, so more Rorschach for me! I'll also use that day to go over to U of R to do the administrative stuff associated with my dissertation project, although I'm sure that I'll be over there a little more often than once a week to get it up and running.

I've also been doing a lot of travel planning this weekend. For those who like to know, we'll be in Tennessee October 10-19th. Our schedule is filling up, so if you want some time with us, make plans! (I'm just being facetious, of course). My mom has a couple of trips here before then, and then she'll be here the week of Thanksgiving too. I think we're going to spend Thanksgiving in Las Vegas and then come back to L.A. to do Black Friday shopping. Now we just have to decide where to stay in Vegas. Then we'll be in Tennessee for Christmas, of course. Exact dates on that have yet to be determined, but we'll all be there by the 19th. Rebecca and I may come a bit earlier and we'll be staying until after New Year. But then we'll have to be back here, because hopefully I'll be doing a lot of interviewing for internships in January. It's going to be a really busy time from now until the end of February, when I will hopefully find out what internship site to which I matched. And of course, Miss Rebecca has a birthday that month as well.

Rebecca and Baby Lucy