living life.

if i had to chose one day to capture the essence of my life, i’m pretty sure i couldn’t. i say this because it’s so fun to look back on the three weeks of vacation we just experienced. i think it’s easy for us to say that our workdays are ‘normal life’ and our holidays are, well, not. yet, while much of my life will be taken up by days at work (hopefully good ones!), i am so very thankful for the time we spend with our family and friends. life is full of good conversations, new meetings, and sweet embraces.

over the holidays, we had the privilege of spending the week leading up to christmas with my family, and the week following with aaron’s. not a privilege we’ll have for long, so for the time-being we are soaking. it. up.

among the many great holiday moments we experienced, which aaron quite perfectly described in his post, one of the highlights was meeting the amazingly stupendous lucy joy whitmore, my brother’s first, born in august. and i’ll just tell you — she looks a lot like her auntie court (aka she’s a fair-skinned strawberry blonde)… but much cuter, of course. she smiles a lot and makes us all melt. and she has two fantastic parents. no picture can capture just how beautiful and wonderful lucy is, but this picture will have to suffice as a demonstration of one of the greatest moments of my break.

we got back into dallas with just enough time to settle in and relax, before it was time to work again. at the moment, aaron is in the middle of giving final exams for the first semester, and i’m in my second week of a rotation in psychiatry. final exams are, well, final exams… but they are also a great time for aaron to take a breather, get his room in order, re-think his plans for the next semester, etc. as for me, psychiatry has [surprisingly] become one of my most enjoyable rotations — though not so surprising when you take into consideration that my first three weeks are at children’s medical center. i look forward to each day in the c.m.c. inpatient psychiatry unit, and am always surprised at how quickly the days go. at the same time, aaron has witnessed a fair amount of tears in the past week. [i know, not something you used to hear much about me!] i am so glad to be there, but it requires a lot of hope and strength, because the kids have such heavy burdens to share. all i can say is that i hope and expect that this is preparing me to be a more sincere, compassionate physician someday.