Presenting.....Ms. JellyBelly, RN

Yes siree...

I am now a REGISTERED NURSE!!

Can you believe it? I sure can't. I came home from walking Brandon and checked my cell phone. I saw this message from one of my classmates (A. Bernado): "hey we passed thanks joyce for the talk and support enjoy your wedding take care and keep in touch B".

Huh??? What? Really?

I tried calling him back as I was turning on my computer. He didn't answer. Ah crap. I looked my name up on the state boards website and there it was. My name, in black and white. Next to it: "Registered Nurse". WHAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTT!!!

I called Mr. JB and of course, he wasn't there. I tried calling my mom too and she didn't answer the phone either. What the heck was going on?

I checked my email and found this message from L.W. and the subject was "Congrats to you Ms. RN!" and she wrote: "I knew you would pass! Yeah!"

Mr. JB returned my call and I said, "honey, guess what?" And he said, "no way! let me guess." I said "yeap, I passed". He was so excited. He said "I knew you'd pass. You're a smart cookie!" Aww..shucks!

I called my dad and he was so excited. He said, I knew you can do it. He was really excited for me. He said.."wow, I don't believe it." I said, "no daddy, really, I'm a registered nurse now". And then he paused and said "I'm very proud of you. You did really good. Congrats." And he asked what I was going to do celebrate. I said, "I have to take Bash to the doctor's". =)

Sigh.. I'm so excited! I have been waiting for two years for this moment. I didn't know if I would make it or not. Okay, that moment of doubt didn't come to me until last Thursday when I took the test.

Here's a breakdown of what happened on Thursday:

Mr. JB and I went to the test center together. He had to be there with me because we both knew I'd get lost if he wasn't there. He's my TomTom. ;) Even with a GPS, I get lost. So, it was good for me to have Mr. JB there. It eased my mind to know that I will get there on time and at the right spot. I parked at the garage and the attendant asked how long I was going to be. I said "Hopefully less than 2 hours but it can be as long as 6 hours." Mr. JB kissed and hugged me and wished me luck. I walked to the testing center. I was nervous as heck. Do I have all my paperwork with me? ID? Check. ATT? Check. Okay. I'm ready.

It was around 7:30 a.m. There were a few more people there waiting for the testing center to be opened. Okay. Let me use the bathroom really quick. WHen I came out of the bathroom, I saw that the testing center had opened and people were taking numbers already. I was #6. The girl at the site gave me two pieces of paper to read. Then, she started calling people one at a time to register. Okay. #4 was checked in and I thought to myself. Oh no. I have to use the bathroom again. I did. Then I sat down and then she called me. My heart started pounding. Holy moly. Okay. I was breathing through my mouth. Breathe in, breathe out. I sat down after the girl registered me. Put my things away, minus my ID card, in locker number 8. I need a drink. I drank a little bit of water. I felt my heart pounding and I took my own pulse. It was over 130. Eeek.. My normal heart beat is around 70. Oh boy. I'm nervous.

Another lady called me and another test taker into her station and went over the testing center rules with us -- how we can get breaks if we needed to by raising our hands but it will count against our time and how we can use the ear plugs as well. She gave us a erasable pad with marker. Okay. This is REAL. Heart pounding...

The lady put me in cubicle number 10. I put my ear plugs in and had to tweak it a little since O've never gotten a chance to use ear plugs before. The clock started as soon as I started the tutorial. And I started to take my test. Question #1, 2, 3, 4,...why am I getting all of these questions? Are the questions getting harder or easier? What's going on? Next thing I know, I was at question #50. Holy Moly. Question #50 already? How in the heck am I doing? All the damn questions. Ahhh.. I told myself: try to remember your questions #75 and try to answer it right. By this time, I was at question #74. What? Already? I selected an answer. Then moved on to question #75. Please please please..let me have more questions. Please please please. Then I hit next. The screen went blank! WHATTTTT!! No..I'm not ready! Please give me some more. I put my head down on the table and wanted to bang on it. OMG.

I came out of that testing room with a lot of anxiety. What was I studying all of this time? How come everything I was studying for isn't on there? What the heck? A waste of 2 years in college and a waste of another 6 weeks of studying. For nothing? Shit!

I walked to my car and tried to call Mr. JB. Of course, he left his cell phone at home. I tried calling one of my classmates S.B. and she wasn't answering either. I saw the attendant and said "oh..that's my car." He smiled at me with that "oohh...less than 2 hours..you must have done good" look. I just wanted to hug him and cry. I didn't. I got the car, and make a right turn on to the street and starting crying. It was horrible. I cried my way home. I didn't know what to say or do. I kept asking myself: did I even know any of those questions? What the heck is going on?

Sigh..

All I could do was just to wait and see my results. I was able to talk to Mr. JB and S.B. and vented out. They were all supportive. S.B. was so funny. She said, if you don't pass, I'll give you my left nipple. I said, alright. I'm coming for it.

My mom called and asked how I did. I said, I have no idea. Then Friday came. I was feeling much better. I was able to finish some wedding related things on that Thursday and also on Friday. Then on Saturday, I saw my dad and he asked how it was. I told him how I was feeling. He said, I'm sure you passed. Sunday, I told my sister in law about the test and she was certain I passed too. Monday, kept myself busy with last minute wedding stuff. Then today, I found out the good news.

Sigh...two years of waiting for this moment ....

One of the biggest decisions...

One of the biggest decisions we had to make was regarding our babies. Who is going to be responsible enough to take care of them when we're gone?

So, I started looking for someone to take care of them last year. I wanted someone I can trust and can handle both our doggies. Mind you, Bashee is an older lady and she walks really slow. And Brandon is younger and he needs his exercise. He wants to play and such.

There's a lady we see almost every morning when walking Brandon. Her son is a realtor and he has a lot of time and he pet sit on the side. We were thinking we can have him come over our house and stay here and walk our kids.

Then, my cousin, Sue, offered to petsit our loves (just the two canines). She offered this a few months ago and I didn't think it was real cuz she was invited to our wedding and thought that she was going to go with us to the wedding. But she declined our invite because her husband has a condition where his body doesn't regulate his body temperature very well. And because our wedding is in August, they don't know how hot it'd be and if his body can handle the heat.

And I still had to look for a pet sitter for my Skitty. Sue has a cat and she was worried that her cat and ours won't get along. I was okay with that. Just by her offering to watch our canines was enough.

So, over the past few months, I was looking for someone who can care for our Skitty. Then, my friend came over and met Skitty and said that she really liked Skitty. And I asked if she wanted to watch Skitty for us. And she said yes. So, a few weeks ago, I followed up with her to see if she was still serious and she said yes. And a week later, I asked to see if she was still sure and to ask her mom. She assured me that she was still interested in watching Skitty. Then, this week, she asked when we were going to need her to watch Skitty cuz she was going out of town August 8th, for a week. I was shocked!! Pissed too. WHAT? Are you serious with me? She had our wedding invitation and knew that we were getting married on the 7th. And then she finally said that her mom didn't want Skittles in the house because she doesn't want cat's hair everywhere. Mind you, I asked her WAY long ago to okay it with her mom and she said everything was okay. And she just told me just this week she couldn't do it. Just a few weeks before the wedding? Does she not think I have other stuff to worry about?

LUCKILY, I am an anal person and had a back up plan. But what if I didn't? Then I'd be going crazy looking for someone. So, I was very annoyed.

And my backup plan for Skitty will be my other cousin, Steve-o.

My cousin, Sue, hasn't backed out on me yet or anything. And between Sue and the realtor pet sitter, Chris wanted to leave our kids with someone who we can really trust and that's why we chose Sue. Chris said that he trusts that Sue will take care of our kids like we treat them. And I agree...

Hopefully, Bash and Brandon will like the time they're going to spend with their cousins, Teddy and Billy....

Count down .. 3 weeks to go

Three weeks to go and we're getting many things done for our wedding...

On Thursday, July 16th, I was able to:

- put our vendor's contact list (phone numbers) together
- put all the information we need to take to Maui (marriage license, our costco travel information, contracts, etc)
* non wedding related -- I cleaned up my office of all the books. =)

On Friday, July 17th, we did the following:

- create a pdf of our table cards, binder tags, hanger tags and luggage tags to take to Kinko's
- print our table cards, our binder tag, our hanger tags, and our luggage tags at Kinko's
- cut our table cards and our luggage tags
- put our luggage tags together
- put the name tags on our luggage tags
- cut out the petal cones
- put the table cards together

On Saturday, July 18th, we were able to:

- put the hanger tags on the hangers
- hole punch our petal cones

I'm waiting for fan handles so that I can work on our programs. I emailed the lady that sold me the fans to see if she sent them out yet. Oh yes, I'm also working on making my own veil. And I ordered the supplies but the items were shipped to another address. The lady I bought the veil making supplies from said that she was sorry for sending it to the wrong address and that she shipped out another shipment today. Thank goodness I followed up on this order.

More stuff to do... Sigh.

I'm a wuss...

My body is a bit strange...

Sometimes, I swear the synapses do not connect right. I've been stressed a bit lately and my body's going through weirdest phases.

One: my body breaks out. I don't mean pimples. I mean, rashes. Yeah. It's weird. I get these rashes everywhere. Oh and I scratch like crazy during the night too. So, that means I have to take some anti-histamine pills, which knock me out like crazy. It takes about 12 hours to get the anti-histamine pills out of my body! Slow!!!

Two: my brain and my body don't connect. The other day, I don't know what happened but one of my legs was on the stairs and the other one was in front of the house. For some reason, I had forgotten the leg that was on the stair and tried to get into the house. Of course, you know what happened? I fell. I told you, my brain and body don't connect.

Three: I get numbed! Seriously. If the numbing and lost of sensation was on my left side, I would be worried for a stroke. I noticed this week, I was getting numbed around my face and my neck. Then, on my ribs and on my thighs. What the heck. Isn't that weird? I told my mom about it yesterday and she called me to tell me to take some aspirin. She's so cute.

Well, today, I'm feeling a little bit better from all the wussiness of my body. I'm going to try to relax....

Long day...but productive!

Sigh..

Today, I woke up at 6 a.m. and started working on different wedding related things. Since things are getting REALLY close, I had to make sure that all the items I want Mr. JB to print is all ready. I started working on our welcome bag correspondance. (You'll see soon enough.) I worked on the table tent idea some more and also on the actual layout of the table name.

Then, when Mr. JB woke up, we ate and then took our kids to the park. After that, we got ready to get our shopping started. First up, we went to meet this lady from Craigslist to buy a babygate from her. Then, we went to a petstore, a music store to look for drum set, a 2nd hand store to look around. Then off we went to Costco, Michael's, Joann's, Party Warehouse, Cost Plus, Trader Joe's, Home Depot and some unique stores here and there. We're EXHUASTED!!! Of course, we went to Chevy's to eat too. =)

Well, we got most of the items off of my shopping list. We're missing a few items still but we got most of them. Good enough. We got most of our wedding related items from Michael's because I found 50% off one regularly priced item coupon. The sales lady was kind enough to use 8 of my printed coupons. So, I saved 50% on 1/2 of my things. But we ended up paying full price for the items we bought for the kids. Oh well. Can't complain.

Now, off I go to work on some of these darn projects. =)

I realized a few things regarding our wedding...

I realized that if you're on a budget, you FIGURE things out so that you can do-it-yourself everything.

Case in point: table tents. We were at Paper Source yesterday and saw that they had their table tents for sale. It came in a package of 10 for $8. But since we only have about 4 tables and I didn't want to waste money on things we can't use, I came home to create one and it came out pretty good. BUT we don't know if we'll be using it yet because we're going to try to buy a few photo holders (pet related) to keep with our theme. You just have to wait to see how everything's put together. =)

I also realized that Mr. JB and I could've saved about $60-70 on our Japanese papers that we used as our envelope liners if we had scanned just ONE of those papers and have it printed out. I seriously doubt that anyone noticed our Japanese envelope liners. But of course, Mr. JB said that people noticed and that they "felt" our Japanese paper. I doubt it. ha ha. We spent a lot of moola and our envelopes for our invite alone came out to about $2+. And you know, people tossed them away. Sigh...

I realized that the closer you get to a deadline, the more you do things. Within this week, while taking breaks from studying, I was able to finalize our petal cones, our table seating chart, our programs, our luggage tags template and our table names. But I still need to buy a few more things to make them all happen.

I also realized that if you have a piece of paper next to you, you get to jot down everything. I think of things here and there as to what items I need to buy for our wedding. But when I get to the stores, my brain has a fart attack and forget. BUT I've been writing things down and it's working out for me. =)

I also realized that if I get up earlier, like 6 in the morning, then you can get more things done too! =)

Where I've been ....

It has been a while since I've blogged because I've been stressed. It's already July and things are finally happening. Well, of course things are happening. Things always happen, right? Well..you're right. But what I was referring to was, things that I've been waiting for, for the past two years, are happending: our wedding, me being done with school, and me needing to study my butt off to pass the NCLEX (the exam you need to take to become a registered nurse).

And it's stressful knowing that you have to do things for the wedding, such as coming up with table names, doing table cards, seating chart, out of town bags, etc. And then of course, I also have to study for the biggest test of my life. Sigh.... So, that's why I haven't gotten a chance to blog as much. But I will soon. You'll see... ;)