NTI

The AACN NTI conference is this week in Washington DC. It doesn't get much bigger or better as far as critical care nursing conferences go. I would love to be there. What a great conference, what a great city!

Lucky-butt nurseXX is there with 3 coworkers, on her hospital's dime, mostly.

They even flew up a couple days early to traipse around DC taking in all the sights of our nation's capitol. Saturday afternoon alone they saw the Capitol building, the Mall, Washington Monument, WWII memorial, the (empty) reflection pool, Lincoln memorial, Vietnam War memorial, and Arlington National Cemetery. Whew! She even sent me a picture of the statue of FDR's dog--a Scottish Terrier of course. (We're in the process of finding a Scottie pup, but that's another post altogether.)

She seems to be having a good time. Well, as good of a time as can be had living in close quarters, 4 to a hotel room with 3 people she's only worked with before.

But here on the home front, if you do the math:

(nurseXY - nurseXX) = nurseXY + (bigXX + littleXX + babyXY)

Which is a very complicated equation, fraught with linear regressions, multifactorial derivatives, and some operations failures.

Mostly though, we're doing surprisingly well. NurseXX doesn't return until Thursday afternoon however...

On top of that I hosted 20+ people at our home on Saturday night unexpectedly. My clinical group was having an end of semester BBQ at our OB clinical instructor's farm. Unfortunately as is bound to happen in Spring in my state, a torrential downpour turned everything into a mud bog, and her house simply isn't big enough for that many people.

That's about the number of people we host at holidays due to nurseXX's ridiculously large family (6 sisters and 1 brother + spouses and kids!) so I obliged. My clinical instructor was concerned as to whether it was OK with my wife, but I told her nurseXX was in DC, and I wasn't saving any BBQ chicken for her.

I suppose I ought to include a picture of the XY+XX children so you, my faithful readers, may ooh and aah over how cute they are.


Lucky for them they are genuinely cute, so the occasional stranger has taken pity on us.

We may survive the week yet.