Week in the Life: Day 4

“The shortest distance between a human being and the truth is a story.”
-Anthony de Mello

This is the story of Thursday:

Due to ever-increasing exhaustion, I'm trying to take a step back on some of the household chores, in order to let Rob step in. For example, washing dishes is my least favorite chore anyway, and it's one that Rob doesn't seem to mind. Although he has his own method and works on a completely different timeline than I do. Which I guess explains why the dirty dishes have sat in the sink for over a week and after he washed them last night, he just left most of them on the counter.

Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. I come down the stairs every weekday morning salivating and craving the quick and easy meal that I've perfected over the years. This morning (and every morning) I prepared a pack of instant oatmeal with water from the tap, three strips of microwavable bacon, and a cup of orange juice. I've tweaked this recipe recently to give it as much of a healthy punch as possible: I'm down to one packet of low sugar oatmeal, I use turkey bacon instead of the real stuff, and I dilute the orange juice a little bit to lessen the caloric impact as well as to tame the taste. If for some reason I am diagnosed with gestational diabetes at my doctors appointment next week, this meal combination will be what I miss the most!

At 4'10" tall, I have always cursed the tall shelves in our kitchen cabinets. However, with a growing belly, I find my reach even more limited than usual. I spend a lot of time on my tiptoes as I work around the kitchen.... in a few weeks as I expand even more, I'm going to wish I had a step stool to carry around with me.

I spent much of the morning prepping for this afternoon's lab. The first time around the printer refused to print all of Dr. Williams' epic presentation for the faculty. On the second try... I could hear the printer from my office, obnoxiously beeping to announce that it was out of paper; I ran around the corner to reload the paper tray, so that it wouldn't bother my colleagues, only to find out I had just two more pages to print. As usual, Dr. Williams kept asking to add more handouts throughout the day, which means even more printing and counting.

In my professional opinion, pregnancy brain is very real. In the last few months I have found myself forgetting simple tasks... this isn't a problem that I'm used to dealing with. To compensate I have to-do lists written in my planner and alarms set on my phone. If a task crosses my mind, whether it is due in a hour or three weeks from now, I immediately jot it down.

As I focus on documenting my week, I'm reminded how much of my day takes place on a screen. Right now one of the big projects I'm working on is an overhaul of the church website. When I started as the church communications coordinator a few weeks ago, the website was a mess... pages were blank, links were broken, and information wasn't placed in intuitive places. In my downtime at work, I've been slowly making progress.

Today I worked on the Outreach pages, setting the stage to tell the story of the many ways that our church serves the community. I can totally get in the zone as I'm working on this project... the minutes and hours fly by, and I find myself hoping that I don't get interrupted by my real work. Friends at church are starting to notice and appreciate the improvements, which is a great motivating factor.

Today's lab was about Dr. Williams' favorite topic and one of the students' most challenging: sacrum and pelvis. He has been very concerned all week about how much he could (and should) cover during this review session. Unfortunately I pulled up the wrong presentation to begin with, but luckily it didn't throw him too much for a loop. The students seemed to remember more about the topic than they thought they would, which made it feel more productive than usual. However, during the second session, the minutes seemed to drag on forever.

As I try to follow along with the lab, sometimes I can recognize terms, but most of the times it feels like a foreign language. I have chalked it up to the fact that I haven't actually taken time to study and apply these concepts. However today I thought about how it compared it to a "language" that I'm more familiar with (even if I'm still learning)... most of these doctors and students would be completely lost looking at a page of html source code. Especially since Dr. Williams comes to my office almost every day to ask me to show him how to place a basic shape on his PowerPoint presentation.

I've had an idea for my Halloween costume for a few months, but wanted to wait until the last minute to make sure that it would actually fit my belly. Using the felt that I bought on Wednesday and an orange shirt that I picked up at Old Navy last week, I free-handed shapes and stuck them down with sticky back Velcro (I'm hoping that I can remove them and recycle the shirt for the Clemson game in November). Can you guess what I'm going to be by looking at the scraps?

By the end of the day I'm exhausted and too tired to document much of the evening. Tonight Rob texted me to let me know that he was going to hit a bike ride and be home around 8:00. Taking advantage of a few hours alone, I stopped off at Publix hoping to find some festive cookies for tomorrow... they didn't have any super cute ones, but I settled for ones with lots of sprinkles.

At home I pulled out the makings for dinner and prepared the chicken, potatoes, and squash... ready to throw them in the oven just before 8:00. In the meantime I sat down to design quick social media banners for the church. When Rob walked in the door 15 minutes earlier than I expected, I scrambled to get dinner cooking. After dinner we sat across the table from each other with our laptops, Rob working on his work presentation for next week, and me editing our Amazon shopping cart for our first big round of Christmas purchases.