Annike's First Day of Preschool

Isn't she adorable? I just want to eat her. Daddy took this picture, and took her to school this morning. I was able to meet them at the school after I left work.

Don't all Montessori classrooms look the same? I love it. I love the materials, the familiarity of the set-ups. The school isn't new to Annike, it's where she and Soren went last school year. The big news is that Annike is in the big girl classroom this year. Lars said she went right into the classroom and started working. Her teachers' names are Ms Chamali (pictured) and Ms Holly. It's just so darn precious.

Now for a work story . . .

I had a very busy night at work last night, one of those annoying nights where each and every one of the patients made me want to quit my job. A night that was so busy that I didn't get the chance to empty my bladder once during the 13+ midnight hours that I was there. A night so long and strenuous that I was on my feet the whole time waddling around on lower extremities that were swollen up to my knees by the end of the night. Okay, so here's the story: I get report from my colleague, as she's going out the door, about a patient (we'll call her Jenny) who needs special considerations in her care but to read the chart as it is all written down. I go to visit Jenny's chart, here's what you need to know: she's there to have her labor induced because of a complication with her placenta, during her 1st trimester and early 2nd trimester she was using crystal meth, this is her second baby, and oh -- she's a flippin' 15-year old! (sounds of screeching car breaks, head lights smashing, etc) Jolly, rotund midwife say what?! Yep, that little patient of mine is a LITTLE GIRL having her second baby, she had her 1st at 13. She lives in an in-patient drug rehab program. I nearly puked. I finally had the courage to walk into her room, convincing myself that sometimes it is not as bad as it looks on paper. WRONG!!! My little 15-year old girl, soon-to-be mother of two was reclining in her bed, eating Doritos, feet propped up on the bedside table, watching Hannah Montana! (sounds of screeching car breaks, head lights smashing, etc) Yep folks, she was watching the tweenie-bopper show on the Disney Channel, Hannah Montana. She was alone in the room, as soon as I walked in she brightened up and started talking incessantly about this-and-that, giggling throughout her conversation with me. She took a quick break in rattling on and on to me to tear the top off of a Pixie stick and dump the contents onto her tongue. Then she took a deep breath to talk again, but inhaled the Pixie dust so then coughed up a big cloud of blue sugar -- which caused her to bust-a-gut with laughter. Just her and me, no one else. I felt like I was at a frickin' sleep-over. No mother in the room, no Baby Daddy, just one lonely, Hannah Montana-watchin' little 15-year old meth dependent LITTLE girl with an STD rap-sheet more detailed than George Bush's federally mandated high school sex ed plan (not that abstinence only is long, or a plan for that matter or that my patient even knows what abstinence means or that it starts with the letter "a" or that she could even say it or that she was even in high school when she gave birth to her first baby). Later in the night Baby Daddy and the patient's mother came to the hospital, the mother is my age (30) and Jenny is her oldest of six children. I'm guessing Jenny has a very narrow frame of reference in which to operate in, either the fictionalized world of Hannah Montana or the pathetically morbid world of her 30-year old mother. The whole scenario is pitiful. Pitifully pitiful.