So, yes...I am blogging about halloween. I know that i'm way behind, but, at least i'm blogging right? The semester is almost over. We have one more week of regular class and then one week of finals. Yay! We made it. Life has gotten easier. Mid-way through the semester, there was a group of us nursing students staying after class to work on these horrible and ridiculous worksheets that we had everyweek from a nursing fundamentals class. These worksheets took about 3 hours to complete one worksheet, and we were never assigned just one worksheet. Anyway, the nursing director asked us waht we were all working on and so we told her. Then she started asking questions and we told her all about these terrible worksheet. Needless to say, the next time we had our Fundaments class, the teacher gave some lame excuse, and she said that she was canceling our worksheets for that class. We were so excited! The semester got much better after that. I asked the nursing director later if she had talked to our Fundamental's teacher and she said that she had :) Nursing school is still tough, but that definately helped with eliminating those.

I actually love what I get to learn about and what I get to do. I did a clinical in an ER at a hospital. Generally first semester students don't really get these opprotunities but the hospital didn't have enough nurses to proctor so I got to go to the ER! Before the nursing instructor dropped me off there, she basically told me to act confident and to "get in there" and ask to do stuff, so I did. I totally faked my way through removing a few I.V. ports (which I had never been trained to do) and got to give injections, got to see a CT scan of a patient that had a twisted colon, got to see the X-rays of a patient that had a broken foot, got to place a catheter, and the best part was, I got to see an apendectomy! One of our patients was having an appendicitis and the surgical team came to the ER to pick her up and take her to the OR. I asked my nurse that I was shadowing if they ever let student nurses into the OR to watch the surgeries. One of the other nurses in the ER said, "No, they don't let students do that...", but my nurse went and asked anyway. The surgical nurse said that it would be okay. So, I booked it down the hall and caught up with the surgical team, I was thrown into a locker room and was told to gown up. I threw on the hair net, scrubs and shoe covers and went into surgery! The surgoen was so kind and he answered my battery of questions and explained the whole surgical process to me. I got to sit on a stool and watch everything. The nurse anestisist even let me look over his shoulder while he intibated the patient. It was the coolest clinical ever!

Fellow nursing students who actually dressed up, hehe. I'm lame :) I just couldn't muster the energy to throw something together this year, but they looked great!

Our ward halloween party. The girls and Jimmy all matched. Jimmy was a princess fairy and wore pink pants :) He is hilarious!

This was our first Halloween in Utah. Since it is a predominantly LDS community, all the kids went trick-or-treating on Saturday (since Halloween fell on a Sunday) and it was absolutely freezing, windy, and raining on-and-off! So Carley wore this little dress with tights underneath the dress, and then she wore a coat on top of it. Taylor refused to dress up at all- probably because she was cold. We went trick-or-treating in the double stroller and the girls made it to like 5 houses before they were frozen. Then, I saw some other parents and they were taking their kids around in their cars, driving from house to house, and letting the kids run out of the car to each house. What a great idea! I had never dealt with freezing weather for Halloween before, so that is what we ended up doing too. I am learning all sorts of new ideas of how to deal with this crazy cold weather.

The spoils of trick-or-treating!