Getting Old, Going 'Under'

Why is it that when I was in college I could live ~energetically~ off of 4 hours of sleep. Now, even 8 hours is not enough. I really feel like I need 10-11 hour night rest to function. Ah, a dream. Makes me feel old. And sleepy.

I woke up early to get some work done before the girls got up. And then Madeleine woke up even earlier. "Whammo! So there, Mama! Just try to beat me out of bed! I'm young! I'm vibrant! I can wake up earlier than you AND go to bed later than another other
child on earth, NOT take naps and STILL run circles around you!"

Storytime: The Hunchback of Montgomery County
Once upon a time, a young girl was born in Utah. She looked different from everyone else, and because of this, she felt insecure. And sometimes she shrugged and slumped her shoulders. Her mother, who was a model of good posture, would gently slap her daughter's back, periodically, to remind the young girl to straighten her back and shoulders.
This young girl grew up, and during her formative, educational years in junior high she was decidedly a nerd. A confident and happy nerd, but nonetheless a nerd with a gargantuan back pack full of books. Picture a heavily laden burro. She became a book-pack animal and this continued throughout highschool and college. Her poor shoulders were malformed by now and good posture was rarely seen.
In college, the problem was exacerbated by the mighty, freezing winds of Boston in the fall, winter, and spring. The gales of ice would whip through her wool coats, penetrate deep into her bones and she would bend in half, shrugging her shoulders, truly becoming a hunchback with a backpack. She would whimper and whine and run with squeals of terror through the winds, bouncing the backpack on her back - to and from classes, across campus and through the streets of Boston.
Perhaps this girl's years in graduate school were a minimalization of the effects of hunchback-ism as she was dating her beloved and graduate school consisted of more online rather than text-book research. However, without her mother's gentle back slap she was still prone to slumpiness.
Cue to her mothering years. The combination of nursing and shushing babies closely while tightly holding and rocking them, and nuzzling their faces while she holds them in her lap have animated the problem of poor posture. Yes, she could hold these babies with a straight back. But the problem of pitiful arm strength and difficulties and awkwardness with nursing really have sealed the hunchback deal.
Thus, the story, although not yet ended, has the likely prediction that as the girl grows older and older, you will one day find her, cane in hand, back facing the sky and sun, eyes to the ground, and shoulders more curved than a roller coaster, sauntering, bent in half, a little old grandmother.
Sad. Sad. Sad.
[Feel free to slap my back any time you see me with bad posture. I won't be offended. Seriously! I will be grateful for the reminder and the possibility to correct this wretched fate of mine.]

As Marc and I get older, I realize the more often we will have younger folk over us. We'll be going under... under the underlings. Two instances of this have occurred recently.
One: Marc had to go the the ER after a particularly bad bout {and I mean BAD - details too disgusting to share} of a GI virus (that I passed to him, that Madeleine passed to me). But imagine my surprise when Marc, after some friendly banter with the "doctor" who admitted him, tells me that his "doctor" was really a 4th year med student with whom he'd worked in a different rotation. Yeesh. It wasn't too long ago that Marc WAS a fourth year med student, but wow. Now he's under med student as a patient. {As a side note, while I was very sad to see Marc so sick, I was rather happy to have him finally experience what it's like to be a patient, on the OTHER side of the coin. Maybe it will grow his already compassionate bedside manner? Give some added perspective?}
Two: I am writing an article for a university public health journal and my editor is an undergrad. Wow. Devastating, right? It really takes the pressure off (so much so that I procrastinate writing the durned piece), but it's kind of a throw back at my age to have someone so young 'over' me.
I guess we're just so old that it's inevitable that more and more people will be younger than us. It's weird.

As opposed to our ward in Philadelphia where Marc and I ranked as fairly 'old' in age, but young in professional education, and definitely on the slow side in having children compared to a large proportion of our ward (think of our milieu as lots of young dental students with lots of, albeit young, kids); now we are now in a ward with a little more age-, professional-, life experience-, child- diversity. And this makes us sometimes older, but also sometimes younger. And it's refreshing to have couples who are older than us but who don't have more children than us. In fact, it was kind of weird when we hung out with a big group of friends for dinner and on the way home Marc mentioned how strange it was that WE were the couple with the most kids there. My how things have changed! We must be getting older!