Oh, Hey. I’m in Grad School.

Life is crazy. That’s not really news, is it?

But I realized I haven’t written about my school well….ever. So, here is my official first school update.
(I’m actually writing this blog post in the ten minutes I have AFTER the kids are in bed and before my class starts!)

In case you don’t know, I’m in the Family Nurse Practitioner online program through Georgetown University. It’s pretty serious business. The courses are all online but there are a couple of “on campus intensives” that are mandatory for checking off various skills. I started last semester taking three classes but realized about a week in to it that even my personal level of overachiever-insaneness needed to admit this was too much, and I went to two classes, part time instead.

That was definitely the smart thing to do. And I like to be smart.

Last semester I took Research and Pathophysiology. It was rigorous and difficult and all those things they told us it would be….times like 10.  And I cried quite a bit about what on earth I had gotten myself in to with this program. And I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to survive. Or at least make a C or something, which in my brain is a lot like not surviving. Dramatic, right?

I ended up with an A and an A- respectively. So, I guess that means the tears and stress were totally worth it.

To celebrate, I bought myself a Georgetown hoodie and a long sleeve t-shirt for Christmas and let my husband wrap them up and give it to me for a present. Cause I’m a really cool wife like that, he didn’t even have to go shopping and he was pretty happy about it.  With one semester in the bag, I figured made me a “real” enough student to purchase some school gear.  And I even finally felt like I could use the tumbler the school sent me as a gift when I got accepted as well, without being some kind of fraud.

(Go Hoyas!)

This semester I am taking Pharmacology and Ethics.

The knowledge that I am now capable of passing these courses means fewer tears, but not really any less stress.  Quite frankly, I could use an extra 5 or 6 hours every day. Still, I think I am managing alright so far. Ethics is really interesting and thought-provoking. Pharmacology is a lot of facts and memorization. They use completely different parts of my brain, and sometimes I feel like my poor little brain cells are saturated to the max and might actually explode if I try and memorize one more medication with an unpronounceable-26-letter-name and its 35 different side effects.

So far, that hasn’t happened though. So I must be doing alright.

I will be taking the summer off because, well, I have five kids who won’t be in school. With any luck though I’m on track to graduate at the end of our first year at West Point.

We’ll have a kid who’s a sophomore in high school and a kid who’s a kindergartner and a few in between. I’ll be working and I’m sure life will still be crazy. Just in a whole different way.

But I’m already looking forward to it.

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