Going Abroad!!!

The past three months have been so busy that I have neglected to blog!!! Well BIG NEWS!

I GRADUATED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am so excited! I am currently a GN (Graduate Nurse) and will start working in January. I plan to take my Boards at the end of January or beginning of February. I was offered a job where I did my internship and will be starting my career in Labor and delivery/postpartum/nursery :) I am so very excited!!

Right now, Cory and I are sitting in the Orlando Florida airport waiting for our plane to...IRELAND! We are traveling Europe for the next three weeks! Happy graduation to us! This is a post-graduation gift to me and an early graduation gift to Cory as he will graduate in August 2010. We are sooooo excited! We will be visiting Italy, Austria, Germany, Ireland, France and England and who knows where else ;) We are traveling with a bit of a spontaneous flair and figuring it out as we go. One of the weeks we are there we will be at the Edelweiss Resort in the Alps with Cliff and Jennifer Jackson for New Years. HOW FUN!!! It is going to be a blast! If I can get wi-fi as we go, I will try to post on here as we travel to keep everyone up dated.

Have a very Merry Christmas! Love to all!

Another weekend gone...

Another weekend gone, another busy week ahead of us. This weekend Cory attended the choir retreat all day Saturday. I went to Lubbock with some Mary Kay girls to a Robert Jones makeup artist workshop. I learned so much! It will be extremely beneficial to my business and to my own makeup application! It was alot of fun :) This week, I will be in the ICU for clinicals, which I am looking forward to. I also have a project due at the end of the week, 2 Mary Kay parties, several meetings for school and 2 papers to get to work on! PLUS my exit exam is in about 2 weeks so I am frantically trying to study and do practice questions. We have to pass this exam to graduate and we get 3 chances. I am very nervous. So I am trying to squeeze in as much study time for this as possible. Cory's week has hopefully settled down some. He has a ton of homework and is continuing to work hard on his research. I am so proud of him :)

I am going to leave you with some pics of our Dove hunting adventure. Have a great week everyone!

Cowboy Days/Hale on Wheels

Howdy :)

This last week I missed a few days of school for a severe sinus infection, bleh it was yuck. Im recovering but still have some congestion issues. Cory was busy at school this week preparing for his conference he will be speaking at on Wednesday, not to mention the insane amount of homework he has plus an exam that same day.

This weekend was fun. Plainview had its 11th year of Cowboy Days this weekend. It kicked off with a chuckwagon breakfast, then a bike ride, followed by a parade/cattle drive down Downtown Plainview, and then a days worth of cowboy activities. It was a ton of fun. Cory and I did the 21 mile bike ride in hopes that we would be done early enough to see the cattle drive, but we missed it :( We finished our 21 miles in about 2 hours. We got to the parade 15 minutes late and missed the horses/cattle! BUMMER! Click here for some picks of Cowboy Days/Hale on Wheels.

BIG NEWS! Cory and I will be going on a Europe tour in December and visit our friends, the Jacksons in Germany:) CANT WAIT! We are still in the planning process but it is gonna be amazing!

This week is gonna be busy. Got another round of clinicals and our final presentation for our Capstone project. See yall at the end of the week maybe :) Have a good week!

Preparing for another busy week.

This past week was busy as usual. Tomarrow I will be attending a Diabetic Education class as a part of my clinical requirement. We have to follow an alternative nursing role and I am following a nurse educator. Tuesday, I have practice for Capstone. Capstone is the final project of nursing school. Our project is to make a presentation on our given topic, which mine is Nasogastric tubes, and make a powerpoint presentation. Then on the 22nd, all the junior and senior 1 nursing students will come in for a skills day and we will be teaching them how to insert an NG tube and nursing management. An NG tube is a tube that is inserted through the nose and goes down thru the esophagus into the stomach. It is used to decompress the stomach, and delivery of nutrition and medication. Fun huh? ;) We will set up a "booth" where we will present to them then they will do a return demonstration to us, proving they are competent of performing the procedure. Of course, we will be using mannequins but it is still nerve racking for them! I have been there many a times in my nursing school career! It is fun to be the one on the teaching end :) Other group topics include wound care, foleys, iv's etc. I think it will be a fun day. This week its just practice but the following week is the real thing. Im looking forward to it ! On Wednesday, I will be doing a 12 hour in Same Day Surgery. I hear I will be starting iv's all day, whoo hoo! ;)

Cory is working a million hours of homework and he is also preparing for a NATAS (North American Thermal Association Society) - or something like that. He will be giving a lecture at this conference on "The Use of Differential Scanning Calorimetry and Thermogravimetric Analysis for Development of Reaction Kinetics for Aluminum-Iodine Pentoxide Reactions" And because I have no idea how to explain what any of that means, we will leave it at that!

I have some pictures for you, of course. I would like to introduce you to Jack, Cali's brother, her littermate.

Jack is my brother Jimmy's new dog. Its awesome cuz the siblings (my brother and I) have sibling dogs (hes got the brother and I got the sister!) Its fun :) Jack is in love with his new dad and is turning out to be a really good dog! We all adore him and hes such a little lover.

Here are some pictures of the weekend our nephew stayed with us before we took him to his new dad. Click on his name here --> JACK

I also have a pretty decent sized album of pictures from our trip to St. Louis this August. It was so much fun and great to be with family. Click here --> August STL

Better hop it to the homework. Hope everyone is having a great weekend :) Talk soon!

Summer fun and some catching up!

Long time no blog!

I hope we find everyone doing well. I have sort of neglected the blog for the past month. We spent a few weeks in STL in August and it was alot of fun! We were busy with garage sales, visiting family and I worked some Mary Kay :) It was really great getting to spend time with the family. I miss them so much!

We have been back for a few weeks and back into the swing of school. Cory is working hard on getting his papers completed and he is always researching, researching, researching. I am doing my clinicals at Covenant Plainvew Hospital right here in Plainview and its AWESOME. I am loving it. Small rural hospitals are a great place to work! I have already been offered a job at this hospital which is exciting! Clinicals are for 12-13 hours on Tuesday and Wednesday although I do some extra hours here and there throughout the month. I have to get 228 hours completed for my internship which means I will be done by the beginning of November! I also have class Thursday mornings and I am on the Nursing Pinning ceremony committe which also meets Thursdays. Busy busy! Tuesdays look like 12 hour clinical then Mary Kay meeting, Wednesdays- 12 hour clinical then choir practice, Thursday- class, Pinning meeting. But after the middle of the week is over, its smooth sailing. Cory and I joined our church choir and we are very excited about it :) Today was our first Sunday to sing with the choir and it was a BLAST. We have rehearsals every Wednesday night. We are also preparing for a Christmas special that will be happening December 12/13. The songs are AMAZING! In November, we are making Christmas cds to sell to raise money for a mission trip and will be performing these songs at the Christmas special! Its gonna be amazing. I missed choir so much and it is great to once again be a part of it :) Cory has also decided to join "are you smarter than a 2nd grader?" which is a tutoring group through our church that tutors elementary school students and he will be doing that on Monday nights. We are really happy to be getting more involved in our church and community!

Of course I have some pics to share with yall. :) They have been piling up!

Here are summer pics - backyard fun!

Cory just finished his Fantasy Football draft so we are off to play some racquetball at the Y! Peace!

Crazy water dog!

Hey folks!!!

Its been a busy summer! I hope everyone is doing well! Cali has been keeping us incredibly busy as she has the energy for about 10 puppies! My goodness, she is crazy! But we love her ;) She is getting smarter everyday and it is fun to teach her new things. These are the following commands she knows: Come, Sit, Up (stand up from a laying or sitting position), Leave it, Stop (for when she is doing something she's not suppose to, like chewing on something or ...swimming), Bring it here (toys), Drop it, and we are currently working on Stay and Follow. She is doing good with stay about 1/2 the time so that is definately a work in progress. She is also doing good with Follow...I never taught this one to Luna so I thought I would give it a try with Cali. First, she was on a leash and i would tell her to follow and as long as she was staying beside me I would continue in one direction and as soon she quit following me, I would turn and go the other way saying "follow." We have graduated to OFF LEASH! So now she will follow me all over the backyard or the house without a leash, as long as I say that command. I want to teach her this because we like our dogs to not have to require a leash. So we are teaching her to follow us so that she will be able to go in the front yard or other places without a leash...building trust here! Luna didnt require a leash once she got older so that is our goal with this one as well. I like being able to take them out in the front yard with me while I work in the flowerbed without having to tie them up. So we did a test run, Follow to the mailbox. She did great!! She is a smart girl :)

She has officially learned the use of the bells on the back door finally. While it was a great accomplishment, it was super annoying lol. Last Thursday, I decided to completely redo our kitchen and reorganize the pantry/fridge/cabinets. It should have only been a few hour project but it definately turned into an all day event becuase every 3-5 mins Cali was ringing the bells to go outside. First it was to potty, then it was to dig holes. I started using a treat at the door to get her to come to me faster and actually listen (you know puppies and thier selective hearing), so then she started to ring the bells, go outside and turn right back around, like "mom Im coming back in, where's my treat?" Oh my goodness. I couldn't say No to outside cuz it was the first day she rang the bells purposefully, so I had no choice but to let her outside everytime...PHEW! So potty training is definately been progressing. We do take her out ALOT to prevent accidents, but now that she is actually telling us when she has to go out, its exciting lol :) The joys of puppies, eh?

So thought I would throw some pictures up here from the past month. Jimmy came down to visit and hang out with us for about a month. And of course, I have lots of pictures of the summer so...here ya go :)

Click Here for pics of Quitique fun with the bro :)

We are convinced that Cali is confused and thinks she is a lab or some other water dog...cuz she LOVES water...here are a few videos to prove this fact...



And here she is yesterday in the backyard lol




When you hear Cory say "crap" and us laughing, its cuz we were about to get wet and while we were backing up Cory lost his flip flop ;)

More vids and pics and updates to come later this week!

Vids and pics of this past week

Got a couple of goofy videos for yall as well as a handful of pics of this past week. Cali is picking up on the bells for outside! Potty training is definately in progress! She spends most of her time being a goofball. She is a very happy, outgoing puppy and we adore her :) Here are some videos and pics! Hope everyone is having a great week.

Pics of the past week

Here is a video of a nightly ritual...as it turns out, its an anytime ritual and occurs multiple times a day....zoom mode!


Puppies always want what is not thiers....Here is proof!



Playing in the hose :)



and lastly, hide and seek ! This is a great way to teach "come" and its really funny too!