Birthing Center, Montana, and Halloween Decos

Two Fridays ago (Oct. 2) Kenny and I went up to Rigby to check out the Agape Birth Center (http://www.agapebirthservice.com/) and we met with a couple of the mid-wives there. We were very impressed by them and the birthing center. They seem to really know what they are doing and they know if/when a situation turns bad enough to send the mom/baby to the hospital. They have rarely had to ship a mom/baby to the hospital, so that makes me feel good! My mom, stepdad, and Grandma Logan all came too because they were curious as to what a birthing center was and what it looked like--let's just say that they went in skeptical and came out totally impressed (not only with the actual birthing center, but with the knowledge of the mid-wives).

Below is a partial picture of one of the birthing rooms. They have a huge tub with candles all around it, there is a double (or queen size) bed in the room, and the ceiling has a sheer canopy-like material strung up with twinkling lights around it to create a relaxed atmosphere. The room is also very spacious (no crowded hospital delivery rooms!).

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The following Sunday my mom and my stepdad took me up to Glendive, Montana (a 9-10 hour drive from St. Anthony) where they now live. I stayed there for a week and was able to have a nice relaxed week! I was able to spend time with my newest niece, Zoey:

...and my nieces and nephew Taylor, Skyler, and Maddison:

I worked on crafts with my mom and stepdad:

This window was taken from an older home when new ones were put in. My dad primed it and painted it green, and then I put a "crackle" paint on it and coated it in a cream color, so the crackling will show the green underneath. I am planning on decorating this side in just a neutral decoration, and the other side I am going to decorate Christmas-y so that at Christmas I can just flip it over. :)

Mom and I staining our freshly cut and sanded blocks to make into Halloween decorations (see farther below).

My sister, Adrea, my mom, and I worked together to make and can salsa:

I was also able to go and hang out at the Glendive Medical Center in the Lab to see what their lab was like. I got to see a venipuncture on a newborn (I've done heel sticks, but haven't seen a venous draw on a newborn yet) and I got to see how a medium-sized lab runs.

I also got to be lazy and just sit and watch the Disney Channel (which I thoroughly enjoyed), and since it is October I got to watch Halloweentown and all the sequels. Kind of corny, but not half bad either. There really aren't too many good Halloween shows out there (either they are too gory, rated R, or just plain stupid), so I thought the Halloweentown series wasn't too bad. So me and Bentley (my parent's little poodle) just hung out together while my parent's were at work and we watched/snoozed while the Disney Channel was playing. :)


I really had a great week spending time with my family--it was just what I needed! Thanks mom and dad for taking me up and bringing me back and for everything else this last week. Thanks Adrea for letting me hang out with you and the kids at your house and for all the baby stuff!
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Today I put up Halloween decorations and had a lot of fun doing it!

These blocks are some of the crafts I worked on while up in Montana:

This says "Spooky"--it's hard to tell from the picture.

These decorations I already had, I just wanted to take a picture of them:

I painted and carved this small pumpkin today and am really pleased at how it turned out!

And my brother-in-law, Travis, and I put this scarecrow together today as well. Travis stuffed the shirt and pants with newspaper and I drew the face and added the hat, gloves, and boots. I really like how he turned out as well!

Autumn Warmth

Things I LOVE About Fall

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*I LOVE the weather getting cooler
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*I LOVE the absolutely BEAUTIFUL colors


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*I LOVE the smell of cooking apples to make applesauce, then drying it to make fruit leather. Also making frozen apple pie filling.
(Side note: this applesauce picture is from last year)
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*In high school I LOVED the start of a fresh year of school and I LOVED football season. Even though I never fully understood football, I loved going to the games.
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*I LOVE that I can start not feeling guilty about drinking hot cocoa.

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*As a kid I LOVED spud harvest because we got two whole weeks off school and I got to go help sort spuds up at the farm (which I really enjoyed doing)!
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*I LOVE going out hunting/camping with Kenny. Usually summer flies by so quickly that we don't get to go camping then, so we usually do it when hunting season comes around.
(Side note: these pictures are from last year)
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* I LOVE Halloween!
I love decorating for Halloween
I love going to haunted houses, haunted forests, haunted mills, etc.
I love going to Halloween parties
I love seeing all the different costumes
I love carving pumpkins

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*I LOVE getting the spicy, warm scents in candles and candle warmers

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*And I LOVE shuffling my feet through the fallen leaves (I don't know why, my mom does it too--genetic or learned?)
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*And someday I will LOVE to harvest a big garden and can/freeze everything in it!
(This will be me someday)
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*I'm sure I missed quite a few, but these are the main ones. As you all can tell, I LOVE fall!

Tomatoes!

Can anyone tell me what to do with all these tomatoes? We don't want them to go to waste, but there's no way we can just eat all these before they go bad! Salsa is the obvious choice, but whereas we don't have any jars, lids, or a pressure cooker (main key), we can't do that. Does anyone know what else we can do?

We're Pregnant!

For those of you who don't know yet, Kenny and I are going to have a baby! And for those of you who already knew, I am not as far along as we had thought originally. Next week I will be 11 weeks along. The ultrasound is our baby at 9 weeks (and I'm sure most of you know this already, but the little "peanut" cradled in the bottom is our baby, not the "tadpole" looking thing floating above it which is the yolk). Our due date is April 6, 2010 and my goal is to do it all natural--yep that's right! :) So here is my belly at (almost) 11 weeks. I'm showing a little bit and my pants are getting a little snug, but I don't have to wear maternity clothes yet.

I took a leaf out of my cousin, Morgan's, book and decided to "yearbook" Kenny and I. It was fun and I feel kind of goofy posting them, but what the heck! :) I think I would have fit in in the 70s.

Gotta love the 90s!

And these are classic!

More Clinicals

I just finished my rotation at Fort Hall Clinic. It was four weeks long and I had a great time. Of course, everything that could go wrong went wrong while I was there, but it was a good experience for me to see how to handle situations like that. A few things that happened are: we were out of reagents for our chemistry machine, so we had to send certain tests to a reference lab; the power went out twice while I was there, which for most people isn't a big deal, but for the lab it fried some of the machines so we had repairmen coming in trying to get them going again, and the power going out tripped our A/C over a weekend and caused the lab to go to 110 degrees F ruining most of our room temperature reagents and blood drawing tubes. I also had quite the experience drawing blood on the patients out there because there were quite a few who were hard draws. I even had the pleasure of drawing on an inmate in handcuffs which was no easy feat! I had to draw on his hands which I don't normally prefer.

Here I am in the Micro department doing what are called APIs--they help identify the type of organism causing infection. They are a lot of fun because they turn different colors and you have use those colors to decide if it's positive or negative for that test, and then there's a number system that you add up and get an ultimate code that you look up that's tied to a certain organism. These particular APIs were from urine cultures and they ended up being E. coli. That is normally what I found out there that caused urine infections.

Here I am dipping a urine dipstick into a urine sample, then I would place it on the machine behind me and it would read it and spit out results that I would have to look at and decide what to do next. When the power went out and fried our machines, this one was one of them that went out, so for a time we were manually reading the urine dipsticks.

Here I am drawing one of my "co-workers" so we could test her blood. She also drew mine so I could run all my lab work while I was there--luckily I'm pretty normal! :)

Here I am filling up a glass tube with my blood to check my erythrocyte sedimentation rate--this checks to see if you have inflammation going on somewhere in your body. Below is where I set my glass tube for an hour, then read how many millimeters there is of serum at the top of the tube (basically).

Above is an interesting sample from a patient we drew on my last day there. This is what the tube looks like once we've spun it in our centrifuge. The bottom layer is all your red and white blood cells, the middle layer is the gel that originally sits at the bottom of the tube but when centrifuged separates the cells from the plasma. The top layer is the plasma--it's not supposed to look like that. It is normally about the color of the middle layer and should be clear. This patient was severely lipemic, meaning they had an increase of fatty molecules (lipids) in his/her blood. There was more going on, but I'm not even sure I understand it, so I'm not going to try to explain it.

And now, my own blood! I was able to take these pictures through the oculars of the microscope and I think they turned out pretty good! Above, as you have probably guessed, the pinkish colored cells are my red blood cells. The other two cells are white blood cells. There are five different types of white blood cells: NEUTROPHILS (take care of bacterial infections), LYMPHOCYTES (are increased in viral infections and leukemias), MONOCYTES (respond to inflammation), EOSINOPHILS (increased with allergies or parasitic infections) and BASOPHILS (not common, increased with allergic reactions). The two white blood cells (WBCs) above are a neutrophil and a lymphocyte (both are the most common WBCs).

Above are both neutrophils, but I had to take a picture of this because this is the second "smiley-faced" neutrophil I've found in my blood (on two different occasions). :) Can you see it?

Above: Monocyte (top) and Eosinophil (bottom). Eosinophils are really pretty because they have big orange granules and large purple nuclei. I know you are all thinking I'm really weird right now, but I don't care. :)

Below are just some pictures of me with the Fort Hall Med Techs:

Me, Krisi, and Anita

Mikey (short for Miquelina), Kristi, and Me

Mikey and Me

A nurse, a rad tech, Mikey, a fellow classmate, and me

This is what our back corner looked like almost every day. Pop, donuts, cookies, cake, turnovers, etc. I think I gained a few pounds while I was there!

A Red Velvet Cake that the lab manager brought for me on my last day. I shared it of course, but it was delish!

The cookies that Mikey brought me on my last day. And Kristi gave me a Bath and Body Works air freshener to "remind me of how bad the Micro room stunk." :)