11 weeks and feeling better?

Okay so I am feeling better lately, you wouldn't know it after yesterday, but that's over too :). My plan is to stay happy and focused and hug the toilet with a big fat smile. I want these babies to be happy and healthy and I need to do whatever I can to make sure that happens.

Mothers have done this before, mothers have done more than this before, mothers have done this an finished their college educations so they can go on to run their own million dollar clinics before...

I ma so lucky, I think that's the part that is hard. Honestly who waits to spend extra time with her husband, decides at 33 she wants children and then is blessed with TWO, yep me. I believe in free will, yet I know my Grandpa Brady and Adam's Grandpa Stephenson and Grandpa Ward had a huge say in this blessing.

I have decided to attach a portion of a paper I wrote about my mother to this posting, it's incredible really and it's all true....

Somewhere between high school and the railroad, my mother got married and had two daughters. She worked extremely hard for the railroad and eventually was promoted to Payroll Supervisor. I can remember her telling me about a colleague, Craig Wentworth. It was 1976 and she started within the same month as Craig. Both only had a high school diploma. The interesting thing to me now is the fact that it didn’t seem to bother my mom to work her 50+ hours a week and see him working less hours and getting more promotions. She didn’t say to herself or her daughters, “Craig just happens to be in the right place at the right time,” or “he knows all the right people, “my mom just kept working.


I can remember numerous weekends spent with my Uncle David while my mom worked, I can remember waiting for 6 o’clock to get here so mom would be there to pick up my sister and I at the daycare. At one point in her career, the railroad was being bought out in Iowa and most people were losing their jobs. The interesting thing to note is Craig was a high level manager by then and he was asked to move his wife and two young children to Chicago, he went. My mom was faced with the same incredible decision. She was single, in her mid to late 20’s and she had two very young daughters. Here she had worked her way up in a company who wanted to move her family to Chicago. I can remember the day she told my sister and me about the opportunity and the simple fact that she was not going to move us to Chicago. She was going to leave her security, paycheck, benefits and seniority for something new.

In the following years I was in middle school, my mom decided instead of living paycheck to paycheck, she would go to school. She had to start at a community college and her first few classes did not even earn her college credit. She took a math class and an English composition class. I look back at the times the three of us would work on homework at the table together, the amazing thing was I was already taking math at the levels she was just now learning. She didn’t blame anyone for her lack of schooling, she didn’t ever mention that she had bad breaks in life and that is why she had to work so hard. She just did the work. .


The people who say there aren’t enough hours in the day should take a page from my mom’s life. There were programs at school my mom missed of both my and my sister’s; the funny thing is I wouldn’t change my childhood for anything. After acquiring her community college degree my mom was accepted at Iowa State University. She drove 50+ miles to and from class everyday. She always took at least 16 hours a semester, including during the summer. I was in high school at the time and I was taking Anatomy, Calculus and Physics, once again I was in classes very similar to my mom’s classes. She stressed education to my sister and I, she always told us “no one can ever take away your education.”


My grandpa Brady was an amazing man who did not ever mince words. He did not say things to say them, he had a purpose and he was always brutally honest. He talked to my mom about becoming a doctor. He told a woman who had no formal education until two years beforehand, to follow her dreams and become the woman she wanted to. Growing up education was not a priority for my mom, getting out of her house and living on her own was a priority. This was one of the first times someone had told her she could actually do it. I look back on my childhood and think about the thousands of times my mom taught us we could be anything, accomplish anything and do whatever we wanted when we grew up. If I would have come in the house and said, “I want to be the CEO for the largest bank in New York,” my mom would have said, “start studying.” If I would have come home and said I want to help children starving in Uganda, my mom would have told me to get all my immunizations in order.


She was proud, passionate, loving and also very loud for a woman of her size. She continued attending Iowa Sate University throughout my high school years, I can remember she graduated with her undergraduate degree, the same year I earned my high school diploma. Then came the remarkable decision, after 7 years of undergraduate school, my mom went to medical school.
My mom went on to excel in medical school and have her two daughters earn their bachelor degrees as well. Keep in mind, her daughters both had college degrees before the age of 25. She has gone from being the first child in her family to have a college degree, to raising two successful daughters and the entire time she was attending college and medical school. My mother’s cause was making sure her daughters had a better life than she did. Fast forward eight years through medical school and residency and finding a job. Her first job out of medical school was for a major medical group in Lincoln, Nebraska.


She spent that first year listening to her patients and helping them, more importantly the leaders of the clinic told her to see more patients per hour. She told us about the conversation, a partner had told her she didn’t need to spend that much time in the exam room and the patients didn’t expect that from doctors. Well this didn’t sit well with her after the blood sweat and tears involved in getting her this far. My mom has always felt that everyone’s time is valuable, sick people spend time waiting for a doctor to even exam them. She didn’t think it was right to have patients wait over 40 minutes to get 5 minutes with the doctor.


Earlier I talked about how mom always said, "no one could take away your education." She completed her contract and when her year was up, she again controlled her fate by opening up her own practice. She was a doctor and she studied too many hours and stayed awake on too many occasions helping people get better for someone to continue to tell her how to do her job. One small detail I will include is, all of her patients switched to her new clinic with her after only knowing her a year, pretty remarkable. The doctors must have been a little wrong about how patients appreciate a doctor who listens to them. I can remember a few years back and my mom was telling me a story about one of the physician's who told her to spend less time with your patients. I guess he had made the comment about her "happy little niche" she had going on in Lincoln. I laughed out loud, I said, "Mom next time he says something like that to you, a woman who turned quality patient care into 10,000 patients and a million dollar building, make sure he gets his story straight. You do not have a little niche, you have a DYNASTY."

In the mean time, my sister went on to medical school as well. My sister has always wanted to be a doctor, in kindergarten she told her teacher she was going to be a pediatrician. Unlike my mom who started later in life, my sister finished undergraduate in four years and is already practicing medicine. My sister’s own Family Medicine Clinic is open, growing and she is not even 30 years old, but she will be soon :).


The first three years of Northrup Internal Medicine, the name of my mom’s clinic, she spent an amazing number of hours working at her clinic and at the hospital. We all pitched in on everything from cleaning, painting and rearranging the furniture. I have never met another human being who could work like her and I know I never will. We have a running joke in our family because my mom is always saying next year will be better, we know better. She can work a 90 hour week and still make time to drive the four hours one way to visit my 2 year old nephew.


She is a force to be reckoned with and she has more drive and determination than any other person on the planet. I figure if she can do all that, I surely can raise two babies with the help of my fantastic family and wonderful friends. I am a very lucky woman, I've had it easy.