On Thursday I reached a milestone that was a long time coming. I took my very last final exam. I walked out of my classroom for good. I am officially finished with academia. I still have another 4 months worth of clinical time before I graduate in May, but the quizzes and midterms and finals are over. Forever.

I am kind of gobsmacked by this realization.

I texted my friend and she replied that she remembered 2+ years ago when I called her, on the way home from school, to tell her that I had decided to quit. I remember it too. It was after I had missed several weeks with a spinal fluid leak. I had missed a major midterm and so much class. And they wanted to do another lumbar puncture that would knock me out of school for at least a few more days.

That night I called my program director to tell her the same thing. I was ready to quit. I just didn’t think there was any way I could do it.

But I did.

As I was driving home from school on Thursday, a song came on my iPod and I heard the words in an entirely new way.

“And high up above or down below
When you’re too in love to let it go
But if you never try you’ll never know
Just what you’re worth

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you”

School, this career was something that I have wanted to do for as long as I can remember. I hated the idea of quitting because it was something that I wanted so badly, something I loved from the first moment I started. I was convinced that I couldn’t do it and so I wanted to quit before I could fail.

But because of the people in my life, my husband, my family, my friends and many of you, I didn’t. I found out what I was capable of.

You are the lights.

You have led me.

You have ignited me.

You have fixed me.

And now I am home. I am finished.

And all I can say now is thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Hello from New York! And from vacation! Both of which are things I love. Other things I love include sleep and food, both of which are going to be in high supply this week.

Tonight we got to go to the Christmas party for the Spider-man Broadway show with my brother-in-law (who is in the show). It was a pretty low key party, but there were lots of very fun and a few pretty famous people there (including an actress from Twilight, who I had no idea was famous). And there was a bunch of free food, which was pretty good as well. I love me some mac and cheese. There were free drinks but I was not allowed to partake in those.

I’m starting to learn a little more about the baby’s likes/dislikes, or at least what instigates him to be busy. He loves fruit and cheese and will almost always kick or move around after I eat either. He doesn’t love it when I yell, which I’ve learned during tonight’s football game. And also, he hates the Giants. Obviously.

Speaking of which, the game was TENSE. My husband is a Giants fan, I am a Cowboys fan. And it was so very back and forth. I think it’s pretty clear we are evenly matched teams, and if it wasn’t for the chicken shit icing of the kicker, we would’ve gone to overtime instead of ending like that. We play each other again in a few weeks. I desperately want to beat the ever living crap out of the Giants. The more embarrassing for them the better.

Also, I’d like to fire the Dallas defensive coordinator. Too many games have been lost because the defense couldn’t maintain the lead late in the game.

I had forgotten how much walking was required to get around New York until we actually started doing it today. I had also forgotten how much less pleasant that walking is when the high temperature for the day is 39 degrees. Also, I think they put more stairs at the Subways. I am 100% sure I walked up way more stairs than I walked down today. I don’t know how it worked, but it did.

I made it to the Fantasy Football playoffs. And then I lost the first game. Wah wah.

I am fighting a headache tonight. It initially went away with Tylenol, but has now come back, which is not my favorite. I just can’t seem to figure out what is triggering them lately. It doesn’t seem to be a specific time of day or activity, but they are intense and frequent. And not my favorite.

We decided to forgo separate suitcases and just pack one extremely massive suitcase. At home it weighed 47 pounds. At the airport it weighed 56. After taking our coats out it was 51 and they let us slide. I love JetBlue for stuff like that. We’re flying American home, I am 100% we will not be nearly as fortunate. And I’m not holding my breath that they’ll let me switch to an aisle seat like JetBlue did either, which ended up being a good thing since I peed 5 times on the flight over here.

The tips of my fingers are extremely dry. My hands are generally dry, but the tips are the worst. And it makes everything feel all wrong.

To catch our 7:15 flight yesterday we had to get up at 5, and then after not sleeping on the plane yesterday, I quickly acclimated to New York time. I have no idea how it’s only 9pm in California because I am exhausted. And going to bed. Goodnight internet.

So last week I started to notice that my husband’s cat, Karma, wasn’t eating her normal amounts of food. Our cats get fed 3 times a day, moist food only. Our vet is the one who suggested this diet and it’s because when given dry cat food Karma gains weight like it’s her job.

Before we switched to the (gross) wet stuff, she weighed 16 pounds. She’s now a svelte 14 pounds. Never mind that my cat eats the exact same amount of food and weighs a little under 12 pounds. Apparently exercise does impact your weight.

Anyways, not eating is not like her, especially the magnitude of the food strike.

And then we noticed how much water she was drinking. Because the cats get moist food, they’re not big water drinkers, but suddenly the water cup was half empty every day. To say we were alarmed would be an understatement. I think we had all but diagnosed her with kitty diabetes.

And then she started being loving and totally stopped biting me and I was convinced that she must be dying because there’s no other explanation for that.

We started closely watching how much she ate, and trying to see if she preferred a certain color can of cat food since there are 3 different kinds in the box or if different times of day were better. But mostly, she was just really not eating much at all. Sometimes she would only lap up the liquid and leave the rest. My cat thought that this was the best week of his life because he got endless double meals, but we were scared.

Because we’re going out of town for a week this weekend, we decided that if things didn’t turn around by Tuesday, we’d go see the vet.

Now, throughout the weekend, we heard some cabinets opening/closing. I didn’t think much of it because cabinet opening is a new skill for my cat and now he’s decided he needs to get into every cabinet no matter what. I mean, I found him snuggling with our extra toilet paper in the hall cabinet last week. So the noises were not out of the ordinary.

Until I heard a cabinet close just as I went to go feed the cats. And when I opened the cat food cabinet what did I find in this cabinet? I found Jacques-Imo, eating from an almost empty (but previously HALF FULL) bag of dry cat food under the sink. And I found Karma, finishing chewing a mouthful of the dry stuff herself.

You guys, these cats totally freaking played me. My husband’s cat was not on a food strike at all, she was eating ALL DAY LONG. She was having a dry cat food buffet and was then too full to eat her normal food. They always drink more water when they’re on the dry stuff. All the pieces clicked together. And since this discovery we’ve found her in the cupboard looking for her snacks about 100 times. She even figured out where I moved the cat food to and is now trying to squeeze her largeness into that small cabinet to get some more.

Thankfully we didn’t take her to the vet or lose any extra sleep over this since she is clearly going to be just fine. You’ll all be pleased to know that since we caught on to her tricks and removed her dry food buffet she has resumed eating normal meals and being as mean as ever. It’s nice to have our Karma back, bitch face and all.

This is the weekend before the last week of my clinical, which means it’s the last Sunday night I have to dread for a little while. And by dread I don’t really mean dread dread, because I actually like my clinical, but it’s the week of my last final exam, so I’m dreading that kind of a lot. But it’s my LAST FINAL EVER, so I’m also pretty excited.

I can feel the baby moving pretty consistently now, and he either loves or hates grilled cheese sandwiches. Whichever is the emotion that makes him move a lot. And yes, it is TOTALLY weird to be able to say him. Also very real feeling. The baby belly is starting to get a little more legitimate too. Don’t you think?

Our cats completely outsmarted us this weekend. I will elaborate more tomorrow, but suffice it to say it is really irritating.

In a week I’ll be in New York! In a week I’ll be freezing my ass off because my winter coat won’t button around my belly. We have not planned anything for our trip yet because frankly, there are too many things to deal with first. I have to finish a bunch of paperwork for my clinical by Friday, I have my exam Thursday, we have a Christmas party to go to Thursday night so I can’t even save all my paperwork for then. I also have to pack and clean up this house because it is absolutely horrifically disgusting and we have someone coming to feed the cats while we’re gone and I cannot leave the house like this.

So instead of doing any of that I made cinnamon rolls tonight. As a tip, if the directions say to roll the dough out on a well floured surface, they mean seriously really well floured. Because my cinnamon rolls are really more cinnamon buns because by the time I got them unstuck from the wax paper I had rolled them out on, they came unravelled and were covered in butter. They still taste good, but I have learned some lessons from this experience.

The biggest lesson is that I need a bigger kitchen.

This was kind of a lousy football weekend. USC is done for the season (Thanks again Pete Caroll and Reggie Bush), the Cowboys lost in overtime after our coach iced our own kicker, and my fantasy team situation is not looking good. If I had played the Kansas freaking City defense I’d have gotten 20 points. Instead I played Washington. Who got me ONE. I think Fantasy Football is not good for my health. Thank goodness the Saints won (again).

Things I don’t care about: NBA.

There are like 20 broken things in our apartment right now but we’re too busy to call maintenance and get them down here to fix them. We have an outlet that’s broken, our sink and refrigerator both incessantly drip water and our sliding screen door doesn’t lock, so the cats can escape if we try to let some fresh air in.

I am going to try something new this week on Babble, which is posting during the day instead of at night. But in the meantime, here are my last couple of posts for your viewing pleasure. Can you tell we have baby names on the brain?
BabyCenter Announces the 2011 Hottest Baby Names
Sharing Baby Names on the Internet

And with that, I’m out for the night. Posting may be a little light this week due to the aforementioned 800000 things I have to do, but I’ll do my best to use the computer for my procrastination.

Today has just not been my day.

Southern California is experiencing a bit of a wind problem. And by wind problem, I mean that last night they recorded a 97mph wind gust in a city across town. This is some real wind here, not like how pretend to have a major storm when 3 drops of rain fall from the sky and life comes to a screeching halt. Trees have fallen over all over town, power is out everywhere, it’s a serious situation.

We are extremely fortunate in that we have had power and no damage has been done to our place or anyone we know so far. We’re still under a high wind warning until 2pm tomorrow, but so far we’re okay. The only real problem is that the wind is very loud. It is so loud that I have been awake since 3 this morning when the wind woke me up. And when it continued to be loud and scary, it was pretty clear that returning to sleep was not even an option.

So, with minimal sleep, I made it through my very last full day of classes, and was so excited that we got out 30 minutes early. It meant I might miss some traffic and I might actually get to spend some time with my husband.

As soon as I got on the freeway, I saw a sign warning me about an accident and traffic jam that was about 30 miles ahead. I checked my traffic app (while I was sitting still on the freeway, not actively driving, I promise) and saw that it wasn’t just an accident, it was a huge accident with at least one fatality. It had occurred at 2:15 and it was still not cleared when I was checking at 4:30. But the app showed that the traffic slow down wasn’t terrible and that it shouldn’t add a huge amount of time to my drive. I doubled checked with google maps who said that with traffic it was only an hour and a half drive home, which is entirely reasonable, in fact, it’s kinda good.

And before I continue, let me just throw it out there that I know that the severity of this accident and the tragedy of a loss of life today is so many thousands of times worse than the frustration I experienced. Please know that I do have some sense of perspective.

So I drove on. Traffic was pretty light until about 5 miles before the accident when everything stopped. I checked my traffic app again (with my car in PARK this time) and it said that the cars at the exit I was at were going 55mph, which, pretty clearly, we were not. It also showed that the accident had been cleared. I kept thinking, okay, surely this is going to clear up. Surely I’d be going 55mph soon.

After an hour wherein I traveled literally less than a mile, I realized it wasn’t going to clear up.

20 minutes later, we moved about 20 feet and we were at the entrance to the carpool lane. The five other lanes were not moving. Not even a little bit. The carpool lane was empty for miles. Every once in a while, a car would drive down the shoulder and hop in the carpool lane and drive off into the abyss. Many of them did not have 2 or more people in the car.

I wanted to. I desperately wanted to. For 45 minutes I stared at the carpool lane, exhausted, starving and wanting to be home or even just out of my car more than anything in the whole world. I saw the sign that said that the minimum carpool fine was 321 dollars, and you know what? I decided that that was the price I was willing to pay.

I knowingly broke the law and I drove in that carpool lane.

I’m not proud of this, but I had reached a point where I needed to get off the freeway and out of my car. I was not driving safely, and there was no end in sight, literally. And if I had been pulled over, I would’ve happily paid those 321 dollars. The only thing I regret is that I didn’t get in the carpool lane 45 minutes earlier and saved myself the stress and tears.

Judge me if you must, but that is literally the first time I have ever intentionally broken a law. Of course I have sped before, but never intentionally. Today, I voluntarily broke the law. And it saved me at least another hour or two, because there were still 4 miles of standstill traffic that I bypassed.

I do not think I am above the law, I do not think I did the right thing, but internet, today I broke a law, and I do not feel even the tiniest little bit bad. Except for all the people who didn’t do the same thing.

And now, I’m going to bed. Because I’ve been awake for 17 hours and I am completely without coping skills. Hopefully I’ll be back to my law abiding ways tomorrow. And hopefully this wasn’t a gateway crime. You never know what will happen next.

I am no stranger to controversy and negativity on the internet. I try not to be a harbinger of this, but it seems to find me anyway.

I’ve written about this before, but the usual suspects aren’t even the ones I’m talking about tonight. Yes, I still have my regular foes (yea Harvard professor, I’m talking to you), but they are predictable, a little sad and mostly just laughable at this point.

Nope, those are not the people I’m talking about tonight.

Writing for Babble has been an interesting experience on a number of levels. On the one hand, it has completely changed my audience and it has forced me to change the way I write, which is a good thing. I am not writing for people I know. I’m writing for strangers, for people who stumble across the site for a day and have no idea who I am. Of course that happens here, but not to the degree it does there. It requires me to try to have more mass appeal and to be more clear, which is absolutely not my forte.

One of the other things that has come out of this is a whole new group of commenters.

The comments here aren’t always lovely, but for the most part, they are pretty good. But in writing at other places I’ve found that there is a group of people who have completely lost the ability to maintain a sense of decorum or tact. My friends and I get comments every day from people who clearly don’t read posts, but who have a bone to pick with us anyway.

These people make vast assumptions, they hold back absolutely nothing. And like 1st graders, they call people names.

Sometimes it makes me laugh, because really? These are adults who are reading (often) no more than the title of a post before leaving an unnecessarily rude and ridiculous comment to a perfect stranger. But there are times where some of the things they say are actually kind of hurtful. After all, there are only about 8000 tons of hormones living in my body right now.

But sometimes more than anything else it just really scares me.

These are mothers. The vast majority of them are writing about parenting experiences, and they are standing up and calling a complete stranger names. They are telling me that I’m a bad wife and I will be a bad mother. If that isn’t scary, I just don’t know what is.

My only hope is that these women teach their children better and don’t share their name calling ways with them. I hope that they teach their children that judging others is wrong, that name calling is unnecessary and that if you don’t have anything nice to say, that you just keep quiet. I hope that their children grow up to be more mature and kind than their mothers. I also hope their grammar is better, because wow.

It just seems like such a sad commentary on our society that we think it’s okay to talk to strangers that way, simply because we disagree. The vast majority of the time, the things I write are entirely innocuous, which makes so many of the things I’ve been called harder to understand.

It seems we’ve truly forgotten how to disagree. Forgotten how to be respectful of those who are different than we are. I don’t expect you praise anything I say or do. I don’t expect you to agree with even half of what I write. But I do expect you to act like an adult. I expect you to treat me with the same respect I would treat you.

I don’t think that this post will result in a huge change mostly because those of you who read here are not the ones who have been the problem. But I hope that if any of you stumble across a new site and are tempted to leave a rude comment, tempted to call someone a name, that you take a breath and think again. That you remember that there are real people behind these computers and that like you, they have real feelings.

And remember that there’s no reason you can’t be respectful and expect the same in return.

Well, in case you haven’t seen, we know the sex of this baby.

And we are absolutely thrilled.

The genetics consultation went well. We are lucky in that we have very few other major risk factors to deal with other than my medical history. Though my husband is Jewish, his family is not of Ashkenazi descent, and therefore there are a few less scary diseases to worry about. Especially since my family is pretty much exclusively not Jewish, so even if he is a carrier, I’m not.

We got our first trimester blood test results and our risks for Down Syndrome and Trisomy 18 are pretty low, one is 1:80,000 and the other was something similar. Apparently we’re not in the lowest risk category, but we’re darn close. I still have to get another blood test to finalize the overall risk, but it looks like things are good there.

The ultrasound looked at every nook, corner, bone and organ of the little dude. And he looks pretty darn good. Extremely cute, too. And boy does he ever like to move. He moved to the point that I think the ultrasound tech was just about to give in on getting any images of his heart or brain because she’d get suuuuper close, and then he’d move. Over and over. And I didn’t even eat or drink anything crazy today.

The ultrasound tech took all the images to the geneticist, who came in and said that overall, everything looks fine. Her only real concern is that his heart is small. Not necessarily that it’s smaller than it’s supposed to be per se, but that it’s so small at this point because he’s very small that they can’t see all the things they need to see. It clearly has 4 little chambers, which is pretty key, but they want us to come back next month to get a second look when he’s a little bigger.

We happily obliged. I can always get on board with extra ultrasounds. So next month we’ll get a second look at his heart and in the meantime, I’m going to refuse to be too worried about it.

At my OB appointment yesterday my doctor decided to move the due date back to 5/7/12 because she didn’t like that the maternal/fetal medicine doctors moved it up a full week after I had my last ultrasound. So it was super fun today to discover that the baby is actually measuring right where he should be if he was due on 5/4/12. So I’m officially choosing to keep the 5/5/12 date. Because Cinco de Mayo is fun and my doctor is being obstinate about the date for no reason.

And that’s pretty much the whole deal. But just because I’m feeling like a proud mom, here’s a picture. Because he’s kind of a looker. If I do say so myself.

Because when I see a small creature doing something that is potentially really dangerous, my very first thought is, can I get a picture of that before he stops? And yes, he is on top of the refrigerator, because of course he is.

Also, because I love that small creature so much it’s almost embarrassing. Almost.

How about those USC Trojans, huh? The game was actually a little painful to watch after a while, but still also totally awesome. I can’t feel too sorry for UCLA because they had no fewer than 3 opportunities to put points on the board and instead of kicking a field goal, they wanted a touchdown. It didn’t have to be a shut out, though it still would’ve been an ass kicking.

I just got home from a weekend with my family. It took 4 full hours for me to drive the 150 miles home, which, in a word, suuuuuucked. It was a nice weekend, though. I got to spend lots of time with both sides of my family, had absolutely awesome food, and didn’t have to work on Friday. What more could I ask for?

We had lunch today at a restaurant my aunt and uncle own, and if you don’t have friends or family who own a restaurant, let me just tell you how much fun it is. They know what you guys like, they get you all the stuff you want. It’s awesome.

We’re trying to figure out how to get our cats fed while we’re out of town for a week. I would kill to live closer to family that we could take advantage of.

On Thanksgiving we told our mother-in-law our current girl baby name. We warned her that it was a little different (it’s not *that* different, for the record), and she had the most amazing reaction ever. It was about 5 minutes of this sound: UUUUUUUUCK. And she culminated the 5 minutes by letting us know that a child with that name would not be welcome at her house for dinner. My whole family suggested that this meant that we would never have to go over for dinner again.

I am having such very odd baby pains today. I have an OB appointment tomorrow morning so I can ask her then, and I have our big ultrasound on Tuesday where we’ll find out the sex of the baby. As a warning, I’ll probably post the results of that scan on Babble on Tuesday in the afternoon, but I’ll try to get it on here by that night for those who don’t follow on twitter or read Babble.

Speaking of which, latest Babble post can be found here.

I only have 4 more days of class EVER. I have 2 normal days, one day where I have to give a presentation and 1 final exam. Granted, I still have a semester left of my program, it’s just a full time clinical affiliation. Graduation is in May, I’m just finished with the school part in LESS THAN TWO WEEKS. I’m so happy I could cry (minus that whole need to study part).

I love my cat. Just so you know.

Because I have my OB appointment at 8:45 tomorrow morning, I don’t have to go to work first. By the time I get there, I’ll be able to treat maybe one patient before turning around and driving right back basically to my house. So I’ll be staying home and heading to work after the appointment. The same thing is happening with the ultrasound. I have school at 8 in LA, but my ultrasound/genetics appointment starts at 8:30, so I’ll be staying home and then heading to school before my 1pm class. It’s going to be a nice slow start to my week.

They make German Chocolate marshmallows. Just thought you should know.

I’m not proofreading this, just thought you should also know that.

I know the name is a little overwhelming because most people don’t look for banana bread with 2 other strong flavors, but this is an awesome combination.

I came across the recipe a few years ago and it’s been my favorite non-traditional banana bread recipe ever since. I made a few changes to enhance the lime flavor because I cannot ever get enough citrus, but I promise it doesn’t overpower the banana.

I’m not going to pretend to understand the people who hate coconut because coconut is AWESOME, but if you’re a coconut hater, it’s entirely optional in this recipe. You don’t have to include any coconut at all. It’s not going to be nearly as awesome, but it’ll still be pretty damn tasty.

There is a small amount of prep involved, you need to zest 4-5 limes (which is a fancy way of saying using a grater or microplane to shave off the outside layer of the lime peel. It’s got AMAZING flavor.) and mash 3 very ripe bananas, but other than that, all you have to do is measure things. It’s really not bad.

You can do it. I promise.

Banana Lime Coconut Bread
Adapted from: Cooking Light

Ingredients
Bread:
1/4 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 large very ripe bananas, mashed
3 limes, zested
1/4 cup lowfat yogurt (I used key lime, you can use plain if you want)
3 tbsp dark rum
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 sweetened flaked coconut + 1 tbsp for topping the bread

Glaze:
Zest of 2 limes
Juice of 2 limes
1/2 cup powdered sugar

1. Preheat your oven to 350, spray a loaf pan with cooking spray (or butter/flour it).

2. Cream together butter and sugar until well mixed.

3. Add eggs and mix well.

4. Add bananas, zest, yogurt, rum, vanilla. Mix well.

5. Add flour, baking soda and salt. Mix well. Add coconut. Yea, it’ll look really gross.

6. Pour into greased pan, sprinkle with remaining 1 tbsp coconut.

7. Bake for approximately 1 hour, until a toothpick inserted all the way into the center comes out clean. Let cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then carefully remove from the pan to a cooling rack.

8. While bread is cooling, prepare glaze. Combine remaining zest, juice, and powdered sugar. Whisk together.

9. Pour glaze over the warm bread. Let it soak in for at least 10 minutes.

10. Slice bread and enjoy. Store in a airtight bag or container and enjoy!

Once you’ve had this tropical banana bread, you’ll never want the traditional stuff again.