Hey, friends! Happy Thursday!

I think one of my favorite posts to read from others are their “Day in the Life” posts– I think it’s so fascinating to see how people go about their days and what they spend each day doing! I’ve wanted to do it for a long time, but any time I tried, I would get a late start, or forget I was doing it about halfway through the day, so I just gave up. Well, I woke up (yesterday) Wednesday, November 1, and thought– today is the day! And I made it through the whole day!

Now, let me preface with the fact that nothing extraordinarily amazing happened yesterday. It was a pretty typical day for me, which doesn’t typically contain anything overly exciting. But here’s a little glimpse into our life! 🙂

 

Steven’s alarm went off at 6:00 AM, and he got up around 6:15. He’s working at the VA on the wards (just like the regular hospital floor), so he has to be at the hospital by 7 to get check out for his team. On rotations like this where he is getting up earlier than I am, I don’t set an alarm because I know I’ll wake up when he does. I usually lay in bed for a little bit while he gets ready if I have time, and then see him off before I start getting ready.

While he was getting ready, I went in to the living room and woke up Boudreaux and Gump. Bouge has been sleeping out on his bed at night and doing pretty well. He doesn’t get into things he shouldn’t or get into trouble. This is where I find him most mornings, and he’s usually a little grumpy that I’ve woken him up. Gump sleeps in his kennel only because if we leave him out with Boudreaux, they end up playing through the night and getting into trouble (we learned this the hard way), and if he sleeps in our room with us and Ruger, he ends up wandering about half-way through the night, or making noise scratching or licking himself (I know, gross!). We’re hoping he grows out of that so that he can eventually sleep out as well, and we can put the indoor kennels in storage. Ruger just lays down next to Steven’s side of the bed and sleeps all night.

I turned on the Keurig while I was out there to get my decaf coffee ready.

 

And then Steven left for work. I got ready (showered, hair, and make-up) from about 6:45-7:45. I typically watch a short episode of a show (something I’m not super interested in so it only has half my attention), or listen to a podcast while I get ready, so I listened to the new episode of The Popcast with Knox and Jamie (Secrets from the Set). My usual morning routine includes feeding the dogs breakfast, and then I try to throw in one housekeeping chore if I’m not running behind, so this morning, I threw a load of laundry in the washer.

I bought a few new maternity tops from Target last week, so I wore one of those with tights, a navy puffer vest and navy flats since it was a little chilly out.

 

I had patients starting at 8, so I headed to work. My office is literally five minutes from our house, so I have the luxury of a short commute! I don’t talk about my job very often here (because there isn’t really much to talk about), but just a little run-down– I’m an audiologist (hearing and balance doctor). There’s a decently wide scope of what an audiologist does, but my current scope is pretty refined– I work at a multi-disciplinary practice that sees veterans for initial compensation and pension exams (C&Ps). So, if a veteran is wanting services through the VA system for a certain health condition (and it  can be anything– hearing loss, arthritis, high blood pressure, whatever), they need an initial exam for this condition to determine if it is service related. In the past, these were typically done at the VA facility, but their schedules have been so overwhelmed lately that they’ve started farming this business out to private practices, which is what we are. We have two (soon to be three) nurse practitioners, and facilities for X-rays, blood work, pulmonary function testing, peripheral neuropathy testing, and EKGs. So, veterans come to me for basically a full hearing test and then I write a report for the VA telling them how service related their hearing loss and/or tinnitus (ringing in the ears) is, and then they are qualified to get services for that at the actual VA (which, here, happens to be across the street from our office).

I like it because it’s all diagnostic– I’m not having to worry about how happy people are with their hearing aids, or how they will be able to pay for their hearing aids, or any of that, which is hard to get away from in audiology (and sales just isn’t really my cup of tea. Some people are awesome at it, and those are the people that should be doing it, but it was just something I wasn’t ever super comfortable with). I’ve met some amazing people– World War II veterans are some of the most interesting people you’ll ever get the chance to speak with– and I think it’s given me a much better perspective on military service life.

At around 11:45, I ran home for lunch…

And this is where I plug our new air fryer! Steven and I have been trying to figure out ways we can eat at home for lunch and not spend so much money on take out for lunch each day. But it’s so hard! I mean, what do people eat for lunch??? We determined the majority of the time it was varying types of fried chicken/ chicken strips (Chick Fil A, Raising Cane’s, Whataburger, etc.), so we talked about doing that at home. But frying at home is such a mess and kinda gross. Except not now with our new air fryer!

Steven was super skeptical about this, and he’ll admit it. I was decently skeptical, but had high hopes. Walmart has these on sale right now, so we decided to give it a try. You put whatever you are wanting to fry (so far we’ve done chicken strips, French fries, mozzarella sticks, and fried pickles) in the basket, set the temperature and time and THAT’S IT. NO OIL. And they are just as crispy as if you fried them in oil! We are sold and figuring out exactly what all we can air fry at this point because it is so tasty, easy, and fun!

I got home first for lunch, so I threw the chicken strips in the air fryer (they needed to cook for about 15 minutes), and moved the laundry from the washer to the dryer. Steven came home, and we finished up the chicken, and then did a batch of fries and a batch of mozzarella sticks to complete our lunch. We watched an episode of The Ranch while we ate (we are so burned out on TV right now, and can’t find anything new we’re interested in watching, so we’ve been re-watching shows we’ve seen several times just for a little background noise).  Then we both went back to work for the afternoon.

I finished up around 3:30 and went home. My hours are fairly flexible– I can be off when I need to be, and do all of my charting/ reporting from home, so I usually have a little down time in the day to be at home as well.

And here’s my confession… I’m a much better human being when I get an afternoon nap.

I can’t blame it completely on pregnancy because I really loved to nap before, but now it seems like I can’t function without one. I’ve learned that if I just schedule myself a little nap (like 45 minutes to an hour), I am way more productive later through the night. Otherwise, I get super sleepy around 7 and that’s about all I’ve got in me for the day.

So, I took my afternoon nap when I got home. 🙂

After that, I started dinner prep and cleaning the kitchen. Some nights I get the kitchen cleaned after we eat, and some nights I leave it for the next day, just depending on what we’re doing. We ended up watching a movie while we had trick-or-treaters the night before, so I left everything for the next day.

The earliest Steven typically gets home when he works on the wards is between 5:15-5:30, but that’s if they get no late admissions, and the night team is on time for check out. I got everything for dinner prepped, but waited to hear from him before putting everything in to cook so it wouldn’t over cook waiting for him. For dinner we had…

Lemon garlic butter shrimp, roasted broccoli, and microwave potatoes (and crescent rolls, but I didn’t snap a pic of those!). Nothing needed to cook longer than 20 minutes, so everything was just waiting to go! [if you are interested in the recipe for microwave potatoes, click HERE! They are super, super easy, and super tasty!]

Steven texted me about 5:50 saying he was about to leave, so I put all the food in and pulled the laundry out of the dryer.

Steven got home about 6:15, and we ate.

 

After dinner, I folded and put away the load of laundry, and then we got ready to go out. Our original plan was to go to the park– Steven wanted to run sprints on a soccer field and I wanted to walk because that’s about as fast as my butt goes these days- but the best park we could think of was completely dark. So, we drove over to one of the local high schools. They had teams playing on the actual football field, but one of the practice fields was lit up, so Steven ran sprints on the field lines while I walked up and down the edge line and listened to The Happy Hour with Jamie Ivey. (Steven is in this picture somewhere, but he must be moving too fast to see! 😉 ).

After this, we went home and relaxed for a little bit. Steven had a glass of chocolate milk and watched dog training videos while I got in my jammies and made myself a cup of hot cocoa to have while I read. Since we’ve been so burned out on TV,  I actually went earlier this week and got a library card and some books from the library and have been reading every night (or every spare second because the books I have are so good so far!). I finished Winter Street by Elin Hilderbrand in less than a day (it was SO good! There are 3 more in the series, so I’m headed to get those next week!), so now I’m on to Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. It’s a little (lot) bigger, so it’s taken me more than a day, but I’m about 115 pages in and it’s really good so far! Both were recommendations from Shay’s monthly book reviews!

 

Around 9:45 or so, we fed the boys and got everyone settled for bed and then went to bed ourselves. And that was our day!

Now, to be honest, some days I’m a quarter as productive, and other days, I have it together. It just depends. But we’ve been in a pretty good stride lately with having the house fairly clean and eating at home, so we have some spare time to do other things. The girls at work have been joking that my nesting has hit hard and early! Whatever it is, I’ll take it!

So, that’s a little glimpse into our glamorous life! 😉 Thanks for stopping by!

 

Linked with Amanda/ That Inspired Chick for The Confessions Series!