Ahhh.....weekend.

This past week has had me sighing with happiness multiple times. Christian took his last regular block exam of medical school (what the?!) last week. Even though he has his OSCE (his doctoring aka patient exam final) coming up this week, he's in a much better place. Splitting his brain between two studying endeavors (OSCE and Step 1) is much easier than splitting it between three. And after this week, we'll be down to one! Don't get me wrong, it's a whopper of a test, but he's such a hard worker and I know he's excited to get to focus his attention on it.

As for our happy weekend sighs: we were so excited when Christian's dad got in touch on Friday and said he and my mother-in-law were thinking of coming up to visit. Christian's mom is a college student (as well as a busy mom) and his dad owns his own business, so they haven't had a chance to visit us in our new house yet. They came up on Saturday, saw the house, and loved on their grand-doggy. We took them to our favorite Phoenix pizza place, Humble Pie (gourmet 12" pizzas made with local ingredients, SO GREAT). 

Then today we met for lunch at the perfect pre-baseball game joint, Alice Cooper's downtown restaurant Cooperstown. No Alice today - apparently he comes often, we've seen him there once - but it was packed full of Diamondbacks fans. Baseball games are always fun and social, whether the team wins or loses (sorry D-Backs), but I wasn't sure what to expect since they had lost both Friday's and Saturday's games to the Braves...and pretty badly at that. BUT we must've been good luck because we watched the Gerardo Parra hit a grand slam in the second inning and the Diamondbacks went on to win it 6-4. Go team!

I actually got to spend a HUGE chunk of the this weekend with my darling husband and his parents and eating more than one meal with him in a span of three days was just a treat. This is the somewhat sad yet true state of our lives right now. But the past few days have been great. Lots of happy sighing. And lots of exercising. And watching what I eat. As you all know, I've been running and training for the half marathon in November for a month and some change. This is ending week one of accompanying my exercise with a food log and it's been SO helpful. I feel like I'm getting stronger and that's awesome. Things that would have made me incredibly sore or out of breath in the beginning feel easy now. The scale is changing a bit but I'm trying to focus mainly on my fitness goals, which means I feel accomplished and encouraged pretty much every day. And that's awesome. :)

My break from school is wrapping up and I miss it already but I received my clinical placement and am BEYOND excited to get started in the clinic, not to mention an opportunity has presented itself to work as a birth assistant for our local birth center. Hopefully my crazy schedule will allow because there is nothing on this earth like attending a birth. My main OB experience is in postpartum, so I'm super hungry for birth experience. More on my midwifery life on another day. We're off to happy sigh our way to a wonderful and much deserved night's sleep.

PS - Our yard is coming back to life!