I Got a Job!

Right around Math Fest time (mid March) I got a job!

For the past 4 years of stay at home momhood, I have applied for any somewhat reasonable part time attorney job just to stay in practice and to not get too scared of my approaching "all my children are in school" empty nesting. Well in March I interviewed with a solo-practitioner who was actually looking for a paralegal since he was swamped in work but we hit it off and he offered me a job and I took it.

Tim is done with school until his residency starts in July so we pulled a Freaky Friday and he is the stay at home dad and I am the bread winner. I think I am enjoying myself more than he is.

I am mostly just excited to be able to get some legal experience while Tim is able to stay home with the kids and Tim is excited to have this chance to build a better relationship with the kids before he starts residency.

Practicing law is awesome. Not nearly as rewarding as parenthood, but it is also not as hard.

I am currently mostly doing adoptions and bankruptcies but I had my first misdemeanor case in criminal court today and it was not nearly as scary as I thought it would be. And of course I did awesome.

I don't have any cool pictures of me all dressed up in my suit so instead I am posting some of our Mess Monster.

(hot chocolate)

Regional Math Fest

James' school's math/science teacher guilted us into taking James to the Regional Math Fest competition in Atlanta Georgia. Initially, we felt it was way too far of a drive (10 hours) for 15 minutes of fame. But we are so glad we were talked into going!

It actually turned out to be a fabulous experience. We decided to focus the trip around the actual trip rather than the competition. We got a hotel room with an indoor swimming pool and took James out of school on Friday so we could spend all evening playing and swimming.

This was our first ever family vacation (that didn't involve staying with family). It turns out family vacations rock. The drive was incredible! It was the first (and only) trip Eleanor hasn't cried the entire way for. The hotel was fantastic. We swam all evening until we were so starving we couldn't take it anymore and then we went to the hotel restaurant for dinner. They had a balcony where we could sit and watch the airplanes take off. We finally crashed around 11:00. Exhaustion is probably not the best competition strategy, but he is only six.

I just can't adequately describe how awesome the trip was.

We actually spent most of our swimming time in the hot tub.

We had a pretty good time at the competition, but the highlight of the trip was definitely the hotel room the night before. It turns out today was Georgia's state championship, so we had to wait until their first and second graders had duked it out before the state champions could all compete with each other. We expected to be there for half an hour max, it turned out our wait was a great deal longer.

All in all it was a good experience though and I am glad that we did it.

James and his state champion goodie bag.

James and the second grade Virginia Champion.

We decided to stop by Sara and Cameron's (Charleston, SC) on the way home since it was only and hour out of our way. It seemed to justify the 10 hour trip a little more.

The kids crashed the instant we got in the car to drive to South Carolina

EVMS Match Day

EVMS Match day made it to the news here in Hampton Roads. They broadcast it at 8:00 and then put the link online. Tim made it into a few shots. Most schools have a much more formal and elegant Match: suits and dresses, wine, hors d'oeuvres. EVMS is the only school we know of that does things a little different.

To see Tim on the news click here. Doug and Tiffany quoted are good friends and part of the Fellowship.

Harvard, Here We Come!

Today was Match Day! Every 4th year medical student across the nation opened up a little envelope telling them where they matched to for residency (the next 3-5 years of their medical training). At EVMS there is a costume theme and everyone dresses up. Since Tim's study group was nicknamed "The Fellowship of the Ring" because it was comprised of the only 5 married people in medical school, they decided to all dress up as Lord of the Ring Characters.

Tim--Legolas, Buffy--Eowyn, Eleanor--Ring Wraith, James--Frodo, Gillian--some kind of assorted Elf (she refused to wear a LOTR costume).

At least no one can say the Bunton's didn't come armed to the teeth (we had really, really awesome and very real and beautiful weaponry).

We matched to Harvard Psych (a four year program) and although we are excited about the program we are terrified about the move. It is hard to uproot and go somewhere with absolutely no support system or even any idea what to expect. Plus New England is so freaking expensive that we are looking at a minimum of 2k/month just to rent an apartment that is smaller than our current house which already feels so small we are going to burst. Of course at least with an apartment we won't have to rake/shovel the copious leaves/snow in a yard.

Of course, being this close to such an amazing school Tim and I are so tempted to find a way to get another degree together from Harvard proper. We envisioning matching Harvard MPH's--they offer a night program. I mean after you are 326k in debt at 8.5% interest you might as well add another 100k.

Lipstick Monster (or is it the Joker?)

Gillian Turns 5--That is all I have to Say

Buffy the quilter?

I totally learned to quilt! Well, am learning to quilt. It is actually way hard. I think I need a bigger surface area.

Me. Quilting! So awesome!

After the terrible time I had of life last spring, I decided that I needed to stop reading and pick up other hobbies. I have never had a lot of talents or hobbies in life. I actually dread the question "so tell me about yourself" or "what do you do." I don't have a lot of confidence when it comes to my ability to create. I am not sure where it came from, but I am completely convinced of my own incapability and lack of creativity and usefulness. I get bogged down in the impossibility of my ideas before I even start. This lack of confidence is exacerbated by my love of reading. Reading is the one thing I am truly, truly good at. I am not a great reader, I am not reading great books nor do I read them quickly, my greatness at reading comes from sheer quantity rather than quality.

Reading is a compulsion for me. I generally read 5-10 books a month with the only exception being a couple months during the last year of law school. Oh, and I am fairly good at school. School just comes naturally to me. But that makes sense, because most school is just reading (or at least the school I do...no hard sciences for me). When it comes time to actually use that knowledge however, I am a complete basket case. I have a lot of interests, ideas, projects running around in my head, but whenever I think about actually acting on those ideas I run aground with two thoughts, "I am just not creative or capable enough to do that" and "I would rather be reading."

Since we've moved to Norfolk and I have been truly a stay-at-home mom in the most complete and total sense of the word. I think I have time alone outside of the house at most 1 hour a month and depending on the year, not even that. I stay at home. I am a mom. Those are the only two things I could say about myself that didn't reference something that was actually my husband's life or my kid's life. I started plunging into an absolute funk which got pretty bad last spring. I finally realized where I was heading and knew I needed to actually do something with my life. I adore my children, I adore being home with them, but what use am I if I allow myself to waste away into a complete and utter non-entity? What kind of an example is that for my children?

I realized that I am capable of teaching myself things. I am capable of learning outside of school and without a teacher. I don't have to be afraid of failure, because no one is watching and no one cares. I don't want to get to the end of my life and realize that I have spent my life reading about other people's lives rather than living my own.

So this past year, I have tried really hard to act on my ideas. If I find myself thinking, I can't do that, it is too hard, I don't know how, I am not creative enough, or it won't be as good as all the other ones I see around me, I take that as my cue to start working on it.

The worst thing that could happen is that it totally sucks and at least then I will be able to figure out what went wrong and what not to do again.

I have created a blog of awesome things (a phrase coined by James) so that I can have a reason to document the things I work on that I personally consider achievements. I know that they are not as fabulous achievements as many of the people in my life (I know a lot of truly accomplished people) but they mean something to me and keep the darkness at bay and having a place to go to look at my "stuff" and to feel pleased with the person I am creating is a good thing for me.

My new Blog of Awesome Things can be found here if any of you want to share in my "stuff."

Just Pictures

Eleanor loves wearing my clothes. This is her wraped up in one of my old touristy beach wraps. She is also wearing my socks. When she plays a part, she goes all out.

Apparently Eleanor snuck into my bath before all the water drained. You think with how much that girl wiggles out of her clothes during the day that she could have taken them off before she got in the bath. I guess that just isn't her style.

Eleanor is Going Goth

I can't remember what made her lips so black (the picture doesn't show it that well) but I do remember the greasy hair came from a run-in with vaseline.

She still breaks character sometimes though...
She hates having her hair in her face but won't tolerate me putting it up. So she spends a lot of time holding her own hair up.

It Strikes Again and Again and Again

Some of Eleanor's messes.

After painting the toaster, the oven, and her face, she moved on to her belly.

At least she is learning to clean them up.

She even makes messes in the clean-up-bath (this one was Tim's fault. The one thing I have learned is to keep shampoo out of her way. One down...several more to go. With how often she gets into that butter, you think I would have learned how to keep that out of her way too).

The Switch

Around the end of December, we sold Eleanor's crib and put her on a mattress on the floor. She took to it astonishingly well.

Emboldened by our success, I moved her to Gigi and James room and put her on the bottom bunk about a month later. Surprisingly enough, Gigi has caused more problems with it than Eleanor has.

This means that James got Eleanor's old room. I can't emphasize enough how much he loves it.

Yet another sculpture taking up space in the living room...

Tim has been working on a new sculpture of his brother Jesse.

Apparently the secret to a good sculpture is to keep both the artist and the subject well hydrated.

Now This is a Snow Day

Friday afternoon we started getting e-mails/txt saying that dance classes and other things were being cancelled preemptively "because of snow." We have had notices like that before and always the snow fails to appear. But we went online to see what all the hub-bub was about and weather.com did say that chance of precipitation was %100.

We woke up in the morning, going about our busy before I remembered to look for snow and lo and behold we already had about 3 inches of it on the ground and it continued to snow all day. It was awesome.

We are woefully unprepared for snow weather though...notice us in our thin fleeces and one-size fits all stretchy gloves. It was doubly bad because the snow kept falling into our shoes making it twice as cold. Luckily we had a large supply of hot chocolate on hand.

It wasn't a good packing snow, so no snow men, but we did throw the snow around a bit in a semblance of snowball shape.

Oh no, we may loose Gillian...

Yup, she is out of there.

I bailed ship with her but the other three had fun for a bit longer.