Funny Dog

I found this lately on a day when I really needed to laugh.  Just thought I would share.

Maggie does run and bark in her sleep, but nothing like that!!!  So funny!  I wonder what he was chasing!

My Girl

We’ve had two seperate ultrasounds where the tech has been pretty sure it’s a girl.  The tech still hasn’t been able to get a view that told her 100% it’s a girl.  She will just not open her legs!

We were able to get the shots of everything she needed to see.  Last time we couldn’t get a good view of the heart of the cord.  But she got tons of shots of the heart today and what she needed of the cord.

We also got video of the entire ultrasound, which I’m sure I will watch over and over.

This girl is going to have my family’s long legs!  Each time her legs measure an entire week ahead of the rest of her body.  She weighed in at 1lb 3oz today.

I’m so excited to start getting the nursery painted and everthing ready.  And of course we can’t wait to meet her!

ACLS

This week I’ve spent my time studying in bed while fighting a nasty cold.  I had ACLS (learning to run a code) class all day yesterday and the test today.

The test includes being the team leader during a practice code, then taking a written test on reading EKG’s and another written test about what to do during codes.  It’s pretty stressful with a lot to learn, but thankfully it was some what of a review for me since I had a quicker version of this class back in Cincinnati.

Now, heaven forbid I ever find myself the only person who is ACLS certified at the scene of a code I will know what to do.  Hopefully, if I don’t forget it all!

I have a brother!

Angie got married on the 3rd.  I didn’t have time to take any pics, but we had a lot of fun.  Angie looked beautiful.

They look so happy together.

And Angie already has him in his place.

Congrats you two!!  We love you guys!

(All of these pics were by their photographer)

Dude, Share The Food!

This week was our church’s service Sunday.  We didn’t have a church service this week and instead spent the day serving.  We all headed to church somewhere else (where Eric, founder of Dude, Share the Food works).  After service our crew and about 10 people from the other church started making sack lunches.

Packing cookies into ziplock baggies

Packing chips (what the crew calls “salties” into baggies

Making sandwiches

Brewing hot coffee for the people outside on the cold, wet day.

Filling the brown paper bags with fruit, cookies, “salties” sandwiches, and condiments.

After getting what I guess to be around 200 sack lunches made up and everything packed into the trucks we headed to downtown Atlanta.  We spent the next three or four hours passing out lunches, hot coffee, and water at a few different locations and a few out of the cars windows as we saw people while driving.  I even jumped out of the car at a couple of red lights.

Eric hanging out with a guy he has been able to build a relationship with over the past year and a half since starting Dude, Share the Food.

Handing out some lunches and warm clothes to these guys.  What is amazing, we were in an older part of town with huge beautiful homes, probably worth 100’s of thousands of dollars, people walked on the sidewalks with bags from stores and went into the pub across the street for lunch.  But the streets were littered with homeless that with our self consuming vision we all fail to see every day.  I wouldn’t have seen them if I hadn’t been looking for them.

Enjoying their hot coffee and lunch.  The guy on the left was pretty much blind.  When he came over I offered him a sack lunch and handed it toward him.  He just stood there and didn’t take it.  He had no idea that I was talking to him, let a lone that there was a sack lunch being offered.  He depended completely on his buddy to guide him through life.

I’m so blessed and spoiled, and don’t appreciate it!  Today made me think of all of the times I’ve driven by a homeless person and kept my eyes purposefully fixed ahead, because I thought I “couldn’t” help.  Every day while I was in nursing school I drove past the same man, on the same corner asking for help.  How come I never thought to make up a sack lunch to hand him while I waited at a red light?  I know why, because as soon as I drove past him I never thought of him again until the next day.

When Brian and I lived in Cincinnati there was a homeless man who went through our trash every week on trash day.  He pulled out all of the metal he could find through the neighborhood then sold it to the scrap metal factory.  This man usually had several huge trash bags full of cans every week and had on nice new clothes and work boots.  But I NEVER, NEVER thought to offer him a cup of hot coffee or some food.  Yep, I’m a spoiled loser.

I know I’m not the only one.  It’s so easy to get out and help others, it usually doesn’t cost much, or take much time.  The hard part, is taking the focus off of ourselves and our busy schedules and seeing the people around us who are hurting.  Maybe you can start by doing one simple thing.  Make up a sack lunch.  Make it PB&J so it can sit in your car for a day or two.  When you see someone standing on the corner, pushing their shopping cart, where ever they are, just hand it to them.  How hard is that?

Matthew 25:35

I was hungry and you fed me,
I was thirsty and you gave me a drink,
I was homeless and you gave me a room,
I was shivering and you gave me clothes,
I was sick and you stopped to visit,
I was in prison and you came to me.

Oh, and check out Dude, Share the Food! If you click on “What Does It Mean” you can see a video.

There’s a bun in the oven!

That’s right! We’re expecting an addition to the family next June 21st! We found out almost a month ago when I took a pregnancy test.

Our first positive test. October 14, 2008

Our second positive test! October 15, 2008

I had an ultrasound today and everything looked good, so we’re finally sharing the news with the world. My due date is June 21, 2009.

The 3D ultrasound picture. November 10, 2008. It’s in position to get it’s butt wiped already!

So, now everyone knows!! Ugh, it feels so good to finally spill the beans! And I can post on here with out feeling like everything is so fake because I have a HUGE secret to hide. We feel totally blessed and lucky, especially since we hadn’t even started trying to get pregnant yet. We had some scares at the beginning because of my gallbladder problems. They did an ultrasound a month ago when I was in the ER and they couldn’t see anything yet. My lab numbers were also low at the that time. But, that all makes since now because we know from my ultrasound today that I wasn’t as far along as we thought a month ago. So, ready or not, here it comes!

Some Pics!

I know, I know.  I’ve been a bad blogger lately.  Today I emptied out the camera’s memory card.  Something I haven’t done in months.  I still have pics on the Nikon to empty, but I at least got the point and shoot empty.  Here’s what we’ve been up to.

Velocity’s first practice service.

Chase playing during encounter time yesterday.

My cousin Damon’s little boy Camron had his 4th birthday and got his first bike.

I went home for my friend Erin’s wedding.

Saturday Brian and I went to Helen, GA for their Oktoberfest.  Unfortunatly, my camera was on some weird setting the entire time, so every picture came out blue.  This is Brian by the Chattahoochee river while we were waiting to be seated at the restaurant on the river.

That’s pretty much it.  We’ll be flying home again in December for my sister’s graduation and then again in January for her wedding.  Today is my first day of work out of orientation.  Hopefully I survive and all of my patient’s do as well!

A Bump in the Night

Around 1AM last night Brian and I heard a very loud bang.  I’ve never seen Maggie move so fast!  She went from under the blankets by my feet to on the floor barking in less than a second.  I think it took about 10 years off of my life.  We both jumped out of bed to try to figure out what it was.  I thought it came from outside since our bedroom windows were open.  I went to the window and looked out, but couldn’t see anything.  Brian thought maybe something fell in the laundry room, so I went in there and looked and checked all of the upstairs bedrooms while Brian and Maggie went downstairs to look around.  Neither one of us found anything out of place.  I went down to the basement and looked around and we flipped the outside lights on.  Nothing…..It was starting to freak me out that maybe someone had been outside or maybe it was a neighbor shooting or something across the woods.  It was defidently loud enough to be a gun going off.

Thirty minutes later after we had walked upstairs and given up on finding the cause of the loud noise I walked into our bathroom and suddenly knew what it was.  I looked into the shower and sure enough that was it.  Our metal shower caddie full of all of our bottles had fallen to the floor of the shower.

It took me about an hour to finally fall back to sleep.  Fun excitement in the Brunke household.

More house pics

I keep getting hounded to post more pics of the house.  We haven’t gotten a whole lot done since I posted last, but here are a few more pics.

Some of my bird feeders.

Brian’s office, still in progress.  It actually looks worse now than it did two days ago.  How is that possible?

The downstairs bath.

The upstairs guest bath.

My office/one of the spare bedrooms.  It’s still a work in progress.  That’s my trundle bed that I slept in when I was young.  We stripped off the brown varnish and painted it black.

Brian mowing the lawn for the first time.

In Need of Prayer

It’s been a rough weekend.  My family has sickness going on along with a lot of stress of who can help take can of my grandparents.  My sister also found out that her fiance got papers to be in Japan a lot sooner than expected.  For those of you who don’ know her fiance is in the Air Force.  This means they are going to have to get married several months sooner than planned.

I also had a really rough night at work.  The nurse that is training me and I were in pod 3, which is where the worst patients are put.  We also had the trauma room, so we had the worst room in the worst pod.  With in 30 minutes we had two deaths in that room.  Both of them came in already receiving CPR in the ambulance.  The first patiens was a cute little old lady from a nursing home, her family came in and handled it well.  They seemed to be at peace about it that she had lived a good life and it was her time.

The next man was in his 50’s, but in very poor health.  He weighed almost 500 pounds with long time lung and heart problems.  About 20 of his family members, including small children showed up and were all hysterical.  It got pretty interesting for awhile.  And please, don’t let small children into the room right after a death.  It’s pretty traumatic and the mom of the children who showed up a little while later was not happy that they were taken into the room by the family.

The next death was the worst, though it wasn’t our patient.   I don’t know the whole story, I just know that a 25 year old female came in with her boyfriend and her 3 day old baby.  I believe she was diagnosed with pneumonia.  Sometime around midnight she started screaming that she couldn’t breath and soon she was entibated, then her heart stopped beating.  The best we could tell she threw a clot.  They worked on her for almost two hours, trying everything anyone could think of.  They even had a cardiologist in the room doing an echo trying to see if there was something wrong with her heart that they could rush her to surgery for.  All of the staff around the ER was silent and teary eyed the whole two hours, just watching the monitor and periodically stepping into the room praying for a miracle.  One of the ER Techs did chest compressions for the entire two hours no matter how many people offered and insisted that he let someone else do compressions for awhile.  I think it was the only way he could feel like he was helping her.

She had no family except for her 19 year old boyfriend, and from what we could gather he didn’t really have any family either.  At least none there supporting him.  I’m just praying that his family will step it up and help him raise that little baby.

I don’t work in the ER again until next Sunday night because I’m in class the rest of this week. Hopefully next Sunday night won’t be so awful.