It has been a big week for our family. Our only daughter, Meghan, finished a 14-month accelerated nursing program at The University of Oklahoma and is now a nurse.

Meghan earned her bachelor’s degree in Foreign Language and Literature – Spanish at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Typically, a bachelor of science in nursing degree is a four year course of study for those without a bachelor’s degree and 24 months for those with one. This curriculum squeezes everything (including clinicals, a capstone project, and a preceptorship) into 14 months. Straight through – no real breaks, no social life, no sleep. In other words, it’s grueling. But she did it!

Meghan completed her program a few days ago with a capstone research project presentation and then a pinning ceremony in Tulsa.

Our parents and Meghan’s friends Amanda and Josiah were able to join us to celebrate this week. We are all so proud of Meghan for making it through.

Next, Meghan will study to take the nursing boards (NCLEX) and good news — she already has job! She’ll be working as an RN in at St. Francis Heart Hospital in Tulsa and we couldn’t be more excited for this next step in her journey.

We had a chance to visit the hospital this week and Meghan gave us and Steve’s mom and dad a tour.

We all got to see the floor where she’ll be working and meet one of her nurse (and life) mentors, Patti. Gayle was also a nurse, so she especially enjoyed seeing St. Francis and where her granddaughter will practice nursing.

All along, we’d planned and budgeted to take Meghan on a trip of some sort to celebrate her graduation and give her a well-deserved break before heading into her full-time nursing career. Unfortunately, we didn’t know until just a few weeks ago what her schedule would be, so we had to make travel arrangements very quickly.

Flights to either coast were quite expensive with the short booking time and hotels in major cities also seemed quite pricey the last week in July. Steve started searching online for the best bang for our buck and found a somewhat last minute cruise deal out of Galveston that fit our timeline and budget.

So, we’re off on a 7-night cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Liberty of the Seas. We leave from Galveston (which was a day’s drive for us from Oklahoma) and have stops in Cozumel, Grand Cayman, and Jamaica.

Meghan is looking forward to finally relaxing and we’re looking forward to spending time with our daughter — the nurse.