nursing, nursing, and more nursing

These past couple of weeks have been nothing but nursing school, and I finally feel like there's an end in sight! Last Tuesday was our critical care simulation & clinical final. As some of you may know, if you don't pass those with a C, you fail the whole course, no matter how great the rest of your grades in clinical or theory have been. And that has happened to me before. Our class of 23 students has dropped down to 16 since the beginning of this semester, so, needless to say, I was very nervous that I would be next. I cried tears of relief on Wednesday when my teacher told me that she couldn't give me my grade over the phone, but she could tell me that I had reason to celebrate. :-) My closest friends and I all passed simulation, but one of our classmates did not. :-( We should be used to this by now, but it just makes us so sad every time it happens.

The day before simulation, my friends Katelyn, Kari, and I went to the park in an attempt to make studying fun...but we took a camera just in case we got bored. We missed you, Lea.

This weekend Mom was here with me and she helped me with my big, fat nursing portfolio that was due today. I don't think I've ever had to so much work to get done in one weekend! I wrote a 7-page paper, a 23-page paper (that one I just did last night and today), a few other random 1-pagers, and I put together my portfolio with samples of my work from the last two and a half years. It was crazy. Thank goodness Mom was here to help me stuff pages in page protectors and make my portfolio "pretty" with lots of cute nursing stickers and cardstock. Mom and I rarely get to spend time together without kids around, so we had a good time and enjoyed getting to eat somewhere other than McDonald's. Thank you so much, Mom!

And here is the finished product! I neglected to get a picture of the title page, which is Mom's favorite part (sorry, Mom). I didn't have time to take pictures at all really; I just snapped these with my phone as I was on my way to turn it in!

And here is the aftermath. My poor room. The first thing I did after turning all my work in (well, after eating) was clean it up! All those papers and notebooks were making me sick to my stomach!

Now I'm off to catch a few hours of sleep before I have to wake up at 4:30am for clinical! Ohhh, this will be over soon.