Snowboarding!!

Okay, how cool is this!?! Part of the curriculum for school here in Vermont is to learn a winter sport. Amazing! So kiddos from Kindergarten thru 3rd grade do indoor stuff (Gavin is taking gymnastics & surprised himself by loving it!) and the kids fourth grade & up get to go to the mountain for some winter fun! They get the choice of skating, skiiing or snowboarding... one guess which one my little dude picked. ;)

So Monday was their first day. Matt, though he's never snowboarded a day in his life either, signed up to chaperone, so he got to go too. I on the other hand, had to stay at home and bite my nails for 6 hours until they were home safe & sound. But he did great! And they had a ton of fun!

Of course, true to form, Mark thought he needed to be perfect at it right off the bat & needed some reassurance that practice makes perfect. But I have a feeling he'll be teaching his momma some tricks in no time. ;) Three more Mondays my baby boy will be up on the mountain-top while his mom takes care of kids with severe head traumas from skiing accidents....... Think I'll have any nails left by February?? :S

My New Vocabulary

As you can imagine, moving to a whole different part of the country means learning a whole new world of slang & terminology. I thought it was weird moving from St.Louis to Kansas City & getting used to "pop" instead of "soda" or "69 Highway" instead of "Highway 69." That was nothing! Since being here I've had more than a few moments where I'm sure I looked like a complete idiot not knowing what in the world the other person was talking about. Here is a list of some of my favorites:

#1: "Jimmies." Nope, not Jimmy Walker. Would you believe this is what they call sprinkles?? We went to the local ice cream shop a few times and stared at the menu a few times before I got up the nerve to ask, "Okay, who's Jimmy & why is he 50 cents!?" lol

#2: This brings me to #2. "Creamy" has always been a descriptive term to me. (i.e. "Mmm. This soup is so creamy...") Well here "creamy" is a noun. It's what they call soft serve ice cream!

#3: A "Johnny." Seriously, I have no idea where this one comes from. And this is where the "Stacia ends up looking like an idiot" part comes in. I had a patient ask me for a new "johnny." I was clueless. I'm a nurse & had to ask my patient what a "johnny" was. Apparently it's a hospital gown. My bad.

#4: It's not just called "trash" around here. Nope, it's "rubbish." I thought they just said that in England? I guess they do in New England too!

#5: A "Flatlander" equals any person who is from anywhere else but the north east corner of the country. Being from KS/MO, guess what they call me! lol




#6: Had someone ask me if there was a "bubbler" nearby. No idea what the heck they were talking about. Found out later it was a drinking fountain. Again, my bad.

#7: "Wicked" has absolutely nothing to do with witches or general evilness. In fact, it's a word New Englanders use for "really really." Okay, lots of people know this one, especially thanks to SNL skits. But seriously they use it all the time! I caught Mark using it in conversation the other day & it took everything in Matt & me not to snicker. It was pretty "wicked" funny. ;)

#8: the "package store" makes me think something along the lines of a UPS store or something like it. Wrong again! For some reason it's the term for the corner liquor store. Who knew.




#9: "Massholes." Learned this one pretty quick. From a self-proclaimed "Masshole" during hospital orientation. Seriously, people from Massachussets tend to be pretty cranky & negative as a whole, and what's funnier is they seem to be proud of it! lol I've also learned that they have major issues with road rage. Consider yourself forewarned.

#10: A frappe has nothing to do with the fancy coffee drink you'd get from Starbucks or even McDonalds. A "frappe" is actually a milkshake. A milkshake is just milk with flavored syrup. Then there's a coffee milk, and a float... it's all very complicated.

#11: A "grinder" to me sounds like some sort of tool. Like a meat grinder or a coffee grinder. But a "grinder" is a sub sandwich. Why, I have no idea.

#12: This is what I would picture when you say "carriage." But here, a "carriage" is actually your regular run-of-the-mill shopping cart. Sadly, not as fancy.



In Vermont they don't tend to have too terribly heavy of an accent, maybe a long "o" once in a while. But as I head over to New Hampshire (or New Hampster as Natalie likes to call it) the accents get thicker, and as I head to work it's even more Boston-esque. There's really no such thing as an "R." As Natalie gets older I start to worry a little bit more of the lack of "r" in some of her pronunciations, but I think it'll go unnoticed around here! lol

Oh wow it's been a long time since I've posted. Sorry!! I guess time just escapes me as of late. I've been busy with work and I haven't had much to report on the home front.

One thing I can update on: my new job! OMG I can not tell you all how much happier I am! As soon as I walked on the unit for my first day, I sighed a sigh of relief: I'm home! :) The PICU here has two faces really. It definitely can have the intense super sick PICU admits that you can conjure up in your imagination. But most of the time it's more of a step down unit. By that I mean kids that are too sick to be on the floor, but not intubated & on death's door kind of sick. So I've been able to ease into this new world of pediatric nursing. I'm having so much fun! :) I actually told Matt on the phone, during my drive home after day #2 of 3, that I couldn't wait to come back to work tomorrow! I haven't felt like that in ages! :) So, in a nutshell, I think I'm going to like it there. I have so much to learn, but I'm really excited to start a whole new chapter in my career. And lesson learned: whatever I do in the future, I just can't step away from caring for kiddos. It's in my blood I think.

Other than that, I don't have much to share. It's been consistently cold here, but nothing big deal. The boys still walk to school every morning, and they're so used to the cold now that even in the single digits I have to beg them to put on gloves & a hat! lol I hear you guys in the midwest had some super warm days lately... followed quickly by tornado warnings... I gotta tell ya, I wasn't envious! ;) Mark starts winter sports with school next week and he'll get to go snowboarding for the next four weeks. He's SUPER excited. Matt will probably chaperone. I SO wish I could go too just to take pictures of that one lol. So I'll be sure to update on that. Plus, the boys are finally taking skating lessons. They're getting better & better every time!

After Matt's accident the truck has been in the shop for the last couple of weeks. In exchange he ended up with a crappy Kia. (No offense meant to any Kia owners out there... we're just not fans). So going through boxes has been crazy slow because he doesn't have the truck bed to work with to haul back & forth. But slowly but surely we're getting there. The bane of my existence lately has been the huge stack of boxes of old files from our former mortgage company. Law mandates that you hold onto customer files for a number of years post closing, so we had a ton stored in our basement & totally could have gotten rid of them a couple of years ago had we been able to get to them. But now we have to shred file after file after file.... ugh. It's rediculous. My living room looks like it snowed in there. But we'll get it all done. In the mean time I'm taking up Dory's mantra:
Just keep swimming... just keep swimming...

Icy Fun

Happy New Year everybody!! Sorry it's taken me a while to post. I had 10 days off of work and we took that time to spend together as a family. Honestly, we did a lot of laying around & being lazy, but we all needed it. We were also able to get through a lot of the boxes and hook up with an auction company here in town. So we've already eliminated the equivalent of at least one storage container if not two. So that feels a LOT better. Once we're done with all of that, we'll focus on the house again. (But the storage costs us a lot of money, so priorities got shifted there for a bit!) But in the mean time, my house here has been taken over by boxes & tools & persian rugs... sigh. It's okay. It's all just temporary. I think I'm past my little freak out. (Hey, I think I've earned a little panic attack now & then, don't you? lol)

Anyway, during our time of laziness we played a lot of board games, the kids put together thousands of lego pieces (I'm still amazed at my boys' building prowess), played some new video games, and we watched a few new movies (mock me if you must, but I do love me some Harry Potter! lol) We also found out another piece of cuteness that this town has to offer: an ice rink! Now, I've posted before about the nice indoor skating rink that the town next door has. It's great fun. But whereas some of you midwesterners may see the constant cold of a northeast winter as a lemon, Vermonters see lemonade! As it turns out, every year the rec department floods the green space of the local park in time for the freeze and creates this massive ice rink! We happened upon it this past week & the kids took advantage of learning to play hockey with what seemed like every little boy in town.

*********The rink ************ Gavin figuring out his skates*****

*******Mark playing goalie***** ****Natalie & her new pal Griffin****

Okay, so our Kansas-ness has shown a little and I'm sad to say that I have failed my children in the skating-lesson department. I'm thinking we'll fix that soon. But they still had fun anyway! And it looks like Natalie made a new boyfriend! ;) lol Seriously, this town is so darn cute I can't hardly stand it! ;)

And on the other side of the winter fun, there's some not so good parts that we have to deal with. We're no strangers to driving in the snow & ice from growing up in St. Louis & spending the last decade in KC, but no one's perfect & sometimes that tricky black ice will sneak up on you. While I was at work, Matt & the kids were driving home from shopping and hit a patch of it on the highway. :( They spun out, hit a milemarker & ended up sliding into the median.

Whoops. But their guardian angel was looking out for them all because the mile marker hit perfectly center between the doors so that neither of the windows were broken and it absorbed that impact on the frame. The hill was pretty steep too & they could've easily rolled, but everyone was completely fine. And with another stroke of luck, this happened to all occur in the one little patch of cell-phone-hell & Matt couldn't call for help, but someone witnessed the whole thing & came to help, so a good samaritan pulled them out pretty quickly. With the exception of Matt's back seizing again and the kids being a little freaked out, everyone is totally fine. Thanking God for that!!! Looks like we need two new doors & a new running board, but no big deal. Poor little three-year-old Natalie has had the hardest time with it though I think. I called Matt on my way home from work the other day like I always do and she immediately started yelling "I WANT TO TALK TO MOOOOMMM!!!!" All she wanted to tell me was, "Mommy, make sure you dwive caefully... don't go in the ditch ok??" Sweet baby. :')