Rob's Defense

I should have written this update about Rob's defense a week ago, but I took an entire week to just breathe again. :) I feel like life has welcomed us back again and that feels SO nice.

Rob defended on June 16th, last Monday. The presentation went really well. Obviously Rob was nervous, but he's a good presenter, so it went really well. Rob was cute and included a thank you to me as his wife (I'm amazed he even THOUGHT of it), and an entire slide at the end that had pictures of him and me and then all the kids.

Then Rob had that hour with just his committee where they tore everything apart, just for fun. :) It was a little discouraging on Monday, what their feedback was. One of the committee members basically said that Rob needed to re-write the entire thing because it wasn't "professional-sounding". Whatever. Formality is so against my nature that I wasn't happy with that feedback. I wanted to yell at her and say, "Your "professional" writing is so formal and BORING that no one can understand it. You want him to write like THAT?" Good thing it wasn't me in there. :)

But through the week as Rob went and talked to each of the committee members one-on-one, it came out what they really wanted. One of the members (not the nasty "professional" lady) said just to revise certain parts of it and not worry so much about an expansive re-write. He said, "I think she meant blah blah blah by what she said." No, not so much. Rob went and talked to her and she meant exactly what she had said. But turns out a lot of her objections were just silly ones and Rob tried to tell her so (in a diplomatic way--my way would have been, "You're a loser. Get over it."). Basically she said she wasn't going to re-read it after the re-write. So when R is happy with the re-write, she'll sign off. And that's taken a LOT of the pressure off.

Rob has extended his start date at Children's. Because the re-write was so expansive, and because Rob is at Scout Camp all this week, it didn't give him a lot of time to make the changes. He said he could have done it in the time he had if I never saw him. Not happening. So he called Dr. J who graciously gave him another 2 weeks. So his new start date at Children's is July 21st. Dr. R wants Rob done at his lab by July 14th (R arranged to pay Rob for the extra time, but wants him out by July 14th), which would give Rob a mandatory vacation with us. :) Happiness! R also said that if Rob needs that extra week, he'll pay him for that week too, so it's pretty stress-free here.

Some of the things we've learned through this process:

1. I don't like Rob getting home every night at 8:00 p.m. for 2 weeks. Yuck. On Thursday as we were nearing the end, I looked at him and said, "Rob, could you think about coming home a little earlier tomorrow? Like 7:00?" He got this look on his face like, "I don't know, that might be really hard." And I almost started crying and yelling all at the same time: "Can you JUST THINK about it?" :) He was home at 6:30 the next night (though not because of me. An advisor was talking to him and said, "I think you're freaking out a little about this defense. Go home to your family." Good woman).

2. It's hard to tell just how stressed out you are until you're no longer that stressed out. :) Tuesday I was driving home from The Beach Waterpark (I made Rob take the day off to play with us--someone gave us free tickets. I thought, "Free tickets the day after Rob defends? That's fate) and I turned on the music. I've been into music lately as a way to tune out. And I realized, as I turned the radio on, that I like music, but I didn't need to tune out any more. Things are good and I'm not stressed past max capacity. And other things happened that week, too. I've been in a state of spiritual apathy lately. I had some issues that I'd resolved no problem, but the apathy remained. I wasn't sure why and I was pretty confused by it, actually. And then on Tuesday it was just gone. Like that. Amazing.

3. As Rob was giving his presentation a few interesting thoughts struck me. First, it's not too hard to see why Rob would have been so stressed about this presentation and defense. He had to take the last 4 years of his life and condense it into a coherent 1-hour presentation. Wow. I thought a lot about that. I mean, what would I present about MY life for the last 4 years? It's an interesting idea. Take the last 4 years of your life and make it a cohesive 1-hour presentation. It made me want to sit down and think about my life the last 4 years. What have I learned? What was disappointing? What didn't happen the way I thought it would, but how did I handle that? What worked just perfectly? Interesting.

And that's the update about Rob's defense.

Rob is not officially Dr. Thacker yet, and I'm not sure when that'll be official. But like it matters. The title is unimportant. Being DONE, though, that's what's important.

Tamra

Children's Museum Pictures

Miciah was at her cousins' house all week (thank you M and C!), so we went to the museum with just the boys for Elijah's special "adventure." We had a great time. One of Elijah's favorite things about the museum is that there's a mock cave in it. He loves to go through it. When I have all 3 kids, Elijah and Miciah race through the cave and fight over who gets to be the leader. We have to go through like 4 times so that they get their fill of the cave and being the boss. But with Elijah being the full-time boss, we only had to go through once, and we got to go through slowly. It was fun.

There's one picture that I got of Elijah on the steps at the cave. Rob had roared at Elijah or done his "scary" voice and it was echoing through the cave and the shot was timed just perfectly to get Elijah's reaction to that. Pretty cute.

Then there's a picture of Rob helping Teancom be Super Teancom!

And two of Elijah working hard at the water play area. Rob and Elijah worked together to build things and do projects. It was interesting because Elijah is just starting to get into working hard and concentrating. So it was fun to see him concentrating.

The last one is of Elijah in front of the skeleton body thing. He likes to talk about how big he's getting. Big and strong "like Daddy."



Here are a bunch of funny shots of Teancom at the water play area.

He basically found every single object floating in the water and put it in his mouth trying to drink from it. Rob was grossed out and kept saying, "Are you going to stop him or just take pictures of it?" Take pictures. Every time I'd take something away from him, he'd move on to the next item. My favorite item he chose was a play fish net. It just cracked me up that he was trying to get a drink from the net. :)

Good times.

Tamra

Pictures

Pictures from the Ward Dance that we went to on my birthday, last Saturday. We spent the bulk of the day moving firewood from our neighbors' yards into our backyard. The storms that came through felled all or parts of 5 different trees, all within a 75-foot area. Craziness. So we helped clean it up and claimed some of the wood. That took us from 10 am - 6 pm. No joke. Then we went to a dance from 7 - 9 and had a great time. We took our kids and they had a blast, too. Someone else was there with a camera and took a picture of Rob and me swing dancing. Awesome!

I had to take some pictures of Miciah wearing her "earrings." For the Ward Dance she wanted to wear earrings, but couldn't find her sticker ones (no pierced ears--we're old fashioned like that and think that 6-year-olds have no business having pierced ears, regardless of how cute it might be). Undetered, she decided to make some. She has some beads and found some string. The only thing I did to help at all was tie the knots. She created the earrings ("Mom, do these beads match my outfit?"), and then devised a way to get them to stick to her ears. She got tape out and taped the earrings to her ears all by herself.

Her friend at the dance (who has her ears peirced) said that the tape was silly. Miciah came to me with that look on her face. The look that says, "Mom, I thought these were really cool, but my friend says they aren't. What's the deal?" I told her I thought the tape was a great idea. And I do. I think the whole thing is pretty ingenius. And I think the picture of Miciah turned out gorgeous. She is growing up!

Teancom cracked us up the other day by putting this "barrell" on himself. He was walking around with his arms inside it and scaring me (what if he falls?). Instead of stopping him, I did what I normally do and got out the camera. :)

And the picture of Teancom is just a random picture. I tried to get that GREAT picture and couldn't quite. He moves too much!!