New Years Eve

This year, Luca and I are planning on extending our 6 year long tradition of cooking a nice dinner (minus the wine this year) and going to bed by 10:30. Do you all have anything fun planned?

I woke up this morning and puked my guts out! It was mostly water. Otherwise I feel like my cold is finally going away. The baby's head is lower in my pelvis this morning and I can feel it when I'm sitting now, as well as when I stand up and walk around. Not comfy!

Luca immediately googled vomiting at 37 weeks and freaked out. "Oh my God you might be about to go into labor!!!" he said.

Yeah, right. At yesterday's appointment, my cervix was thinner, but still closed. In any case, the baby *better* not arrive until after my candidacy exam on Tuesday. I don't want to have to prepare for that all over again.

Which, incidentally, I have no idea what I need to be doing to prepare for this. I wrote my protocol, and of course will not receive any feedback on it before the exam. I literally have no idea what people are going to say or ask me, and frankly most of them have never administered a candidacy exam before, so in fact THEY probably don't really know either. I'm really only afraid of what my statistician will ask me since a) she is a statistician, and b) she has done this before.

I'm kind of anticipating a committee meeting on steroids.... and if this meeting goes as well as my last committee meeting in November went then I should be ok. But then again, most of them have never seem my third aim before. Add to the fact that my PI didn't want me to do it the way that I think it needs to be done based on what a more experienced investigator told me a few weeks back. So of course I had to write it up the way my PI wanted it. I'm anticipating that my other committee members may pounce on it as wrong. Good times.

So to prepare, I'm reviewing my protocol. Again. Going over my slide deck. Again. Reading through the literature (some more). Making sure that I've read all the papers my PI has forwarded to me over the past several months.

Convalescing.

It's been hard to get really motivated or stressed out about this exam. I mean, what would happen if I failed? I suppose I'd have a better idea of what to expect next time.... It's not as though my progress on any of these projects would stop. I'd simply give birth, re-prepare, and then re-present in 4-5 months, with (in theory) more completed work behind me, and more opportunities to receive guidance on what they think I should be doing differently. I have to have another committee meeting in 6 months ANYWAY, so would it really be that much more of a pain? I don't know. Of course I'd like to avoid that scenario....

As for New Year's Resolutions, I'm not so into them, but I'm hoping to strive for the following:

1. Continue trend of eating more salad and vegetables, which I started during pregnancy.
2. Keep up better with the literature in my field.
3. Sleep as much as possible.

Other than that, who knows what the next few months will even bring, so it seems silly to give myself a bunch of resolutions that may end up being completely unreasonable.