These days I’m supposedly the teaching resident at Outside Hospital, and while I feel like patients here get super-duper really excellent care, I don’t feel like I’m contributing to the educational milieu or learning much myself.  I need medical issues to arise or at least just plain old problems to pop up in order to learn something and hence, teach about it.  I’m starving for something interesting to arise, and things here have been relatively straight-forward basic stuff. Which makes me nervous about my stint next week as the teaching resident at The Mothership hospital.  I’m finding that I’m only a good learner on “active” problems or cases.  How do I make it a good learning experience for others if I can’t find an “active” case or problem?

Mental starvation aside, I’m also really hungry all the time, and have discovered the breakfast egg-n’-cheese sandwich on English muffin.  Outside Hospital has generally given us meal tickets for breakfast, and I’m spacing out my 8 breakfasts here well, because those tasty, tasty egg-n’-cheesewiches really kick the hunger and keep you going through rounds until lunch time.  So it’s no surprise that I’ve gained 5 pounds in the last week, and I can feel shift in weight distrubution and balance in even the little things, like picking up my bag, or reaching for stuff on a high shelf.  I went to my first prenatal yoga class and I was the only lady there who rolled off her balance ball…and I was the least pregnant one there.  This does not bode well for Gully.

Oh, and we found out Gully’s a girl! Big surprise because I was convinced it was going to be a boy and was kind of hoping for a boy if only because the name game wouldn’t have to kick in.  A boy would have been easier - he would have just gotten Joe’s ridiculously uber-Italian name with a big ol’ “the Fifth” attached at the end.  Not that he’d even be 1/5th Italian, but just 1/8th Italian.  The certainty of a boy’s name was so absolute that it was almost like an unspoken law when we got married.  “What if we don’t ever have boys, then what happens?” I asked once, and Joe very matter-of-factly said, “Well, then I’ll have you beheaded.” 

If that’s the case, then we should name our girl Elizabeth, but we’re actually toying with two-syllable names.  Because we like shorter names, okay? Just because.  And we actually have a “secret” girl name that we’ve liked since forever and ever, which we’re 75% certain might be the name, which might not be so secret soon.  Unless it’s taboo to announce the name…but I think it’s not, right?  That’s just what people do, if they don’t hold out on the sex of the baby, then they hold out on the name, just because they feel like it, right? Not because of some weird fear of a mystical curse or anything right?  Because I hate secrets, and I want to tell everyone the name!  I think we’ll announce it as soon as she has a middle name, too, because she’s getting a Chinese middle name, which my parents are going to figure out.  Right now, our placeholder middle name is “Bing-Bong,” which is ridiculous yet not too far off from my actual given name, which is Bik-Yin (yeah, Miranda is only on my birth certificate as my middle name).  So she’s Gully Bing-Bong Onorato until we otherwise come up with something that sticks a little better.