Minnicks On Their Road To Ever After: The things I NEVER knew….

Disclaimer: This blog may be very long, dramatic, boring, and appear to seem similar to someone's brain vomiting. Stick with it :)

First of all I am so sorry to have been gone from blog world for OVER a week, let it be a hint to you as to how crazy this past week has been for me… Needless to say, I am very sorry to my 2 loyal readers!! :)

Second of all you are now reading the blog of a SECOND year MSW graduate student!!! You should feel so honored!! I have officially finished all my exams and it feels WONDERFUL!!

Lets re-group and re-focus shall we?

As I drove home from my last final all i could think about was “what would my life be like had I not been accepted to the program?”

Then I began thinking of all the things I have learned….

This is what I came up with: I never knew……

A job could be so fulfilling and rewarding.
I would meet such wonderful, smart, educated and talented people in my cohort and through my work experience.
The actual day to day results of people who have been repeatedly abused.
The amount of stress I could endure.
How many hours I could really go with out sleep highlighting, reading and making note cards.
I could be so happy learning new things.
APA citations could be so time consuming and become the largest pain in my ass of grad school hands down.
I could cry instantly while hearing one sentence come out of a strangers mouth.
I would change my mind so many times as to what I want to specialize in, marriage and family, hospital, trauma, sexual abuse, substance abuse, grief, PTSD, adolescents/adults….. I think the more i know the harder it is to narrow it down…
I would be able to make a 95 on a Final Exam covering the entire second half of the DSM!! Who knew?!?!
The effect poverty can have on families.
The amount of help social workers and other agencies in the community are able to offer to needy families and individuals.
How confused I was when deciphering who a victim was and learning it’s more than likely the one doing the “wrong” even if that means wanting to sell their 7 year old daughter to sex slaves which in turn continues the cycle of victimizing.
How excited Alex gets and how much more he loves me for being in love with what I do and the smile across his face when I explain something I learned to him….. talk about being supportive.
Someone could be physically, mentally and sexually abused so many times by so many different people in so many different ways and grow up thinking it’s normal.
How exciting it would be to actual start doing something you have talked about doing “when you are all grown up” since the age of 8.
The degree in which i could surprise myself.

So I could probably go on forever but I won’t…. I will just say I have learned a lot and am so glad I made it this far…. but I am still scared to death of next year!

Switching gears a bit- In the midst of my busy, busy, busy, non-blogging week of …..

My first night alone with out Alex (no worries mom and dad rescued me) since we’ve been married (which will be a year THIS SUNDAY!), Millys attempt at going on a diet, Tucker catching a bird and his mama screaming SO LOUD that it scared him into letting it go, 4 apartments in our complex getting robbed in the middle of the day, Alex finishing at CLEMSON, having the popo knock on my door for making my loud puppy voice screech, finishing my last day at Mothers Making a Change, Milly shaking so hard and waking us all up at 4am to a thunderstorm refusing to go back to sleep unless she was in between us (which if you know Mill, this is weird, she hates the middle) and studying….

……was a bad idea gone right: My first trip to Six flags!

How can I resist with this group though??

Andy got all of us free tickets that included parking and a free lunch so Lou an I were in!

I was sooo happy to hear that Autumn HATES rides too! People like me have to find people like her in situations like this, not that the peer pressure gets to me as far as roller coasters go….. I promise you can say ANYTHING… still not getting me on anything I don’t want to go on, it’s just fun to hang out in the lines holding everyone's stuff with someone else along side you starring up and saying OMG they are crazy!! :)

I think I have no ass currently for laughing my ass of at Autumn the entire time…. her and I decided we would be perfectly fine if we could get little umbrella drinks brought to us and ride around on the parking lot trolley as our adventure park “ride”.

The picture above is while we were waiting to hop on what I thought was the only ride of the park I liked/wanted to go on, the wooden roller coaster…. WRONG! Let’s just say it was similar to being in a car wreck.

No this is not a picture of it.

Honestly though, who would do something like this? Apparently all of the crazy asses we went with!!! My Lou was quite the champ, he didn’t get dizzy or throw up one bit!! Can you believe I did that the Sunday before Exams?

The good part is that looking back apparently it wasn’t that stupid of a decision because I did make it through finals!!

We are now making our way down to Hilton Head to celebrate both of us being done with school and our 1 YEAR ANNIVERSARY! I can’t believe it’s already here…. sadly we will be leaving the sweet babies with their Grama and Grampa until Sunday (I have to see my babies on Mother’s day right?)

We sure will miss them!!!