Start of an interesting half month

Jb is currently in the shower. He just finished his PT test for the Air Force. He scored well enough that he won't have to test again for another year. They do a run, push-ups, and sit-ups as well as getting weighed. JB missed getting maximum points on the weigh-in by 0.9 pounds! He knew he was close, but man, how close is that? If you don't score well, you can be retested in 3 or 6 months. John will have a year before facing the test again.

Today is the beginning of what will be a very interesting two weeks for us. JB is on every evening from 6pm until 8am the following morning. He does get his weekends off, however, his sleep will need to totally flip. We aren't exactly sure how this will work. For instance: when do you eat breakfast? Dinner? When do you sleep? Do you sleep as soon as you get back or do you wait to sleep until you have been up for a little bit? As far as breakfast: I love breakfast food. Maybe I'll eat breakfast myself and then breakfast again with him!

Either way, from what we can figure, he will have about 2 hours home each day that he isn't sleeping. If he is at work for 14 hours, that only leaves 10 more hours in the day. If he is to get 8 hours sleep -- that means we have 2 hours to hang out. My only plan is to make sure that I am not working during those 2 hours.

Today is additionally bad. Each week, JB has his "own" clinic for a half day. This is where he sees his patients -- the patients that have been assigned to him. No matter what rotation he is on, he has his own clinic half-day each week. John loves his clinic day. When he came home from the clinic the other day he told me: "This is why I went to medical school!" Today is that day. So he'll go in at 11, possibly race home for dinner around 5, and then return for his night shift.

The two weeks of nights seems a bit overwhelming, however, I personally think they will be better for us as a family than if he were doing what a lot of call people do. I know, Lesley, for instance, is on call every fourth night. Les, I'm not sure your opinion, but to me, this seems harder (for the spouse) especially. If you are on call every fourth night, then after recovering for two days, you have only day of sanity before being on call again. Instead, JB has only one call day a month. The rest of the time he is only on during the day (or into the evening), but he gets to sleep in his bed. The exceptions are these two week periods. He has three of those during the next year. Now add to Lesley's situation that her husband is also a doctor on his own nights ... Lesley, how do you manage this?

As for me, I'm getting some practice at our daughter's arrival I suppose! I am sleeping in the living room with my puppy in his cage. He needs to go out about every 3 hours. So, I put him in the cage, he cries for about 30 minutes, chews himself to sleep, and then wakes up 3 hours later crying to go outside. I bring him outside, he relieves himself, gets a treat, and then returns to his confines. Last night he woke up at 11pm, 2am, and 5am. I must have been quite a site out there in my flip flops and eye mask pulled up on top of my head! Scrubs was trying to convince me that 5am was the morning. I wasn't so convinced and forced him back for another session which he ended at 7am with a good cry to go out again. John thinks this two weeks is perfect timing since he'll be gone for all of it leaving me to get up every 3 hours. Hopefully the 3 hours will continue to grow each night!

I have another question for everyone, completely off topic. Does milk sour faster in Florida than it does in Minnesota? In our 4 years in Minnesota, I don't remember milk ever going bad on us. We have just lost our second half gallon! What are we doing wrong?! Any thoughts on this? :)