Figuring out the new phone

I was so busy figuring out my new phone and writing a paper for my summer class that I forgot to take any pictures. So here you have an eblip, processed to boot.

I am slowly decompressing after the stress of taking my BIG, BIG exams, and learning I have passed. I now have (well, will have in August) a second master's degree (Master of Science in Educational Psychology), which I needed to get on the way to a PhD if I wanted to teach as an instructor and not a graduate assistant. The benefits are obvious for someone with a family an a life outside of the "school life": pay increase and health insurance being the main ones. On the downside, I will have to slow down a bit finalizing my PhD; I just won't be able to take 3 classes a semester. Thankfully, I don't have that many classes left.

Being in school as a wife and mother is very different than doing it as a single twenty-something. It kicks your ass. Every time I wasn't there to tuck my son to bed at night I felt guilty. Every boy scout meeting missed, every baseball game. Husband Dear paid for it too - in times I was there, but really weren't. We would be watching a film at night to relax, and I would remember something, dash out of the room, run to my calendar to write it down, or pull a textbook compulsively to check something out. Other times, we wouldn't watch movies at all, as I was busy with paper writing till wee hours of the following morning. Or we would be at a restaurant, and I would recite the stages of childhood development as put forth by Piaget in my head, and not hear a word HD was saying. That must have been really annoying and sad for him.

I can't really blame the program for it, the fault lies with me. I am rather intense, and when learning something, I try to learn it ALL. As I went into all of this from a vastly different and unrelated background, the learning curve was very steep. It is getting better now, but I still struggle. I wish I knew how to do it all in a lighter way somehow, not go down the rabbit hole with no chance of immediate return. Last semester, I had a bit of a breakdown: started losing my hair, had trouble sleeping, had horrific headaches, felt really lost and weighted down. My doctor gave me two options: either get on an antidepressant/anti-anxiety drug long-term, or take time to sleep, eat, exercise, spend time with my boys, and get on a vitamin D supplement. It really wasn't a choice; he told me exactly what I needed to hear. Things got better. I am still working on it.