3

I just put my 3-year-old to bed for the last time.  In the morning, she'll be a 4-year-old.  Bittersweet.

Three seems to get a bad rap.  I think I've mentioned on here before than when working with other people's kids, I have found 3 to be one of my favorite ages.  Numerous friends assured me that it would be different when it was my own child being ridiculously stubborn and emotionally (and physically) out of control.  And we definitely had plenty of awful 3-year-old moments.  Becca is not a mellow kid.  :)  But 3 has also been, by far, the most entertaining age.  Her little mind is so busy making connections, and you never know what she is going to pop out with next.  For example, on the way home today, she said, "When boys come to my house, I'm going to punch them."  What what?  She's a trip.  If I'm wearing black, she pretends that I'm Ursula (of Little Mermaid fame) and runs away.  Obnoxious, yes.  Hilarious, yes (for a while).  Tonight after John got her out of the bath, she ran around the house naked and hid in the pantry.  Dripping wet.  Crazy kid.

Anyhow, Becca's third year has been a good one for us.  She's done pretty well health-wise, she's made a LOT of progress on eating, she's grown fairly well, she's made progress in school, and she'd getting close to being fully pee-potty trained (not so much with the poop).  Considering where we were 4 years ago, praying for a few wonderful minutes with our sweet girl, I'll take every single one of the 2,101,290 minutes she's been in this world...even the obnoxious ones.

Some recent shots of 3 in all its glory...

Sleeping in her humongous big girl bed, passed down from another Rebecca at church!

Modelling her Big Sister shirt she made with Miss Becca

Tinker Becca

Ready to swim!

Strawberry pickin' with Grandma

First braid!  Her hair is finally long enough!

Becca and Daddy pretending to be Lady and the Tramp.  That's amore!

Back at the Hospital

I know I've been a crappy blogger lately, and I'll try to fill you in on all kinds of goings on, but I wanted to go ahead and tell you what happened this week with the little Boo.  The Big Sister Boo, that is.  The formatting is weird because I'm copying and pasting from another webpage, but I'm sure you'll manage.  :)  I'll let you know what the docs decide to do next week.  (And briefly: me and baby boy (definitely a boy) are doing fine and go back to the doc this week.  So far, so good there!)

[Background: Becca has had 2 other seizures in her life. One was clearly hypoglycemic-related (blood sugar was 45 at the time), and the other was related to an illness, though not necessarily febrile, as by the time the ambulance arrived (I was driving down the interstate at the time - awesome), she didn't have a fever. That time, they kept her overnight, gave her antibiotics for the underlying illness (which we had been at the doc for that afternoon), and sent us home with a med in case she seized again. That was over a year ago and probably related to a tick-borne illness.]

Becca came home from school at noon on Thursday (normal time) and told the babysitter that her tummy hurt and she wanted to lie down. She felt feverish, so the babysitter gave her Tylenol (I told her not to bother with a temp b/c I trusted her judgement that she was feverish but not crazy hot), and they had a lazy afternoon sleeping and watching tv. 

I came home at 6:30, and she ran to the door, jumped up and down, etc to greet me. So she definitely had some energy. She still felt warm, but I planned on giving her Tylenol at bedtime (just an hour later). She still wasn't crazy hot or anything.

So by 7:30, I'm getting her bedtime stuff together while she's watching baby videos of herself (so cute). I'm assembling her feeding tube stuff in the kitchen and hear her making some whimpering-type noises from the couch. I check it out; she's seizing. I get her rectal Diastat kit prepped; we're supposed to give it to her if a seizure lasts longer than 5 minutes. It lasts for at least 4 minutes (assuming it wasn't going on TOO much longer before I noticed), and then she stopped shaking but was still out of it and not really responding for another few minutes. After about 15 minutes, she's responsive, but kind of drunk and -- this was the scary part -- unable to talk. She would answer questions by nodding or shaking her head, but couldn't get words out. If you've even seen someone who has had a stroke trying to talk, that is what it looked like - sticking her tongue out a lot, trying to form words with her mouth, but not being able to do so -- or even get any sounds out. Then she vomited - yellow, bilous-looking stuff. I took her temp after the seizure, and it was 104.3. Blood sugar was 173. Breathing was fine, didn't appear to desat at all.

The on-call ped said that she "absolutely needed to come in and be seen," so I got our stuff together (sad how quickly I can pack a hospital bag for me and her these days  ) and waited for DH to get home (5 minutes away). If John hadn't been close, the ped was going to have us call an ambulance so that I could watch her during the ride. 

So we drive 40 minutes to the kids' hospital, are immediately triaged (never given Tylenol because at that point she wasn't even feverish - at all). She started talking (slowly) on the ride in, which made me feel better. In fact, her first verbal response was her Simba "ROAR" when I prompted her with the line from "I Just Can't Wait to Be King." Pretty adorable. So - we go through triage, and they send us to the waiting room. For 3 hours. By the point, she's pretty much herself, though still her sick self, and she pretty much laid in a chair and slept. She's 3 hours behind on her tube feeds (not having had anything since lunchtime), so I start bugging the nurses to get us back to a room so we can start feeding her, or we are going to be looking at a hypoglycemic seizure on top of the first one. We even considered leaving because I felt like what she needed most was to sleep and get her feeds, but I was afraid insurance wouldn't pay if we left without being discharged.

Finally, we get back to an ER room. The nurse checks her out; vitals are fine. After about an hour, we see a resident. All is well. I'm lying on the cot with her, and John is miserable in a crappy chair. After we had been in the room for 3 hours - now it's 3 am - we still don't have her hooked up to feeds b/c the nurse needs the docs to order it, and we haven't even laid eyes on an attending yet. I mean, I'm glad we weren't in the trauma room keeping them all busy, but, really, 6 hours later, I would have thought an attending would have at least heard about us. So I go out to the nurses' station to remind them that we are here, and one of the nurses is quite surprised to hear that we've been waiting in a room for 3 hours. Yes, and 6 total, thank you. And at this point, John is "sleeping" on a sheet on the emergency room floor. Ew.

After that, things start moving; we see the attending, he orders a strep test. I remind them about tube feeds, and that *eventually* gets started as well. Becca was a super champ, of course, even "roaring" again so that the nurse could perform the strep test. The attending also wants us to get a urine sample. Right. Get the not-potty-trained 3-year-old away from home to pee in a cup. We give it a couple of tries, but give up, not wanting to traumatize her to the whole peeing on the potty thing, which is *finally* kind of getting the hang of. We ask if they have to have it (the only other option is to cath her - ugh), and the docs says that basically, he wasn't looking for anything in particular, so never mind. Phew. Feeding pump alarms every 2 minutes (literally), so John and I take turns sitting by it and restarting it every time. The nurse doesn't know how to use it - we had to teach her. (But really, she was wonderful...we have just dealt with a lot more pumps than she has.) Strep test comes back negative. Docs don't know what else to do; nurse suggests they send us home. Great idea. So we are out the door about 5 am (after arriving at 9 pm), with a *suggestion* to call neurology to set up an EEG and consult. 

We drive through Krispy Kreme (which just happened to open early on Friday mornings - thank you, Jesus  ) and get home about 6. We all sleep until 11 and proceed through a normal day and weekend, albeit on the lazy side. By the time we got home, she was COMPLETELY FINE. That's the oddest part to me, and kind of nerve-wracking. I mean, if the seizure were really related to the (brief) illness/fever, why/how could she bounce back so quickly? I mean, the fever was COMPLETELY gone by the time we got to the hospital, and she was herself the next day, even without sleeping much. So that concerns me that there might be some underlying seizure disorder that we are just now seeing. The good news is, though, that if there is an ongoing condition, it appears to be mild, since we've only seen 1 seizure a year (though who knows if others have happened during the night, etc - but still, if so, she bounced back quickly). I doubt that she'd have to go on full-throttle seizure meds, but it's another thing to watch for, I guess. 

Disney Pictures!

I keep saying that I'm going to post pictures of our Disney World trip...so I'm finally going to live up to my word.  Only took, what, 3 weeks?  First, a few thoughts on planning a Disney vacation with a little one:

• Free Dining Week - Hell to the yes.  The week we went (and a few others during the slow month of February), if you stayed at a Disney resort, you got the Disney Dining Plan for free.  Staying at a moderate resort, we got one table-service meal, one quick-service (counter) meal and one snack a day each.  That adds up to a lot of food, especially when one of your group is primarily g-tube fed.  This is by far the best deal Disney offers, which is why they do it in their slow times.  This is such a good deal that I figure we'll do it at least one more time, pulling the kiddos out of school, even though the Boo will likely be in elementary school the next time we go.  We also decided that whenever we go outside of free dining week, we'll bit the bullet and buy the dining plan ahead of time so that we aren't stressing out every time we eat, 'cause it ain't cheap.  Most of the food we had was delicious, but, yeah, you pay for.  (Unless you don't.  Like we didn't.)
• Everybody told us we should stay "on property," meaning at a Disney resort, and I'm so glad we did.  We went back to our hotel most every day for naps for Becca and me (some days more me than Becca!), and it was so much easier than making a commute that locked us into our plans for the day.  And with the dining deal, it was probably even cheaper that way.  We stayed at Coronado Springs, which was fine, but next time we'll probably stay at a different moderate resort - not that there was anything wrong with it, and I'd recommend it, but there are so many fun-looking ones that it would be nice to try another one.  When I'm rich, we'll stay at the Polynesian.  It was really cool.
• The "park hopper" option on the tickets is a must.  It's pricier than you would think, but it was definitely worth it to have maximum flexibility.  We often spent half a day at one park, went to the hotel for a break, and spent the evening in another park.  It also enabled us to see most of the parks in the day and at night, which is cool because they are all different at night. 
• Character meals were a BIG hit with Becca.  That's where most of the pictures below were taken.  Becca LOVES anything in character, so it was truly magical for her to get to chat with the princesses, hug on Mickey, and counsel Eeyore ("Eeyore, don't be sad!  It's okay!).  Since we were on the dining plan, we did several character meals - otherwise, we probably would have scaled back since they seem to be more expensive than the regular table-service meals.  It was so nice to see the characters this way instead of waiting in long lines to see everyone.  We still waited for a few characters, but all of our must-see's were covered with our meals.  Some of our favorites included breakfast at O'Hana (with Lilo, Stitch, Pluto and Mickey) and the princess lunch at Norway in Epcot.  (The other princess meal option is in Cinderella's castle, which would have been cool, but it counted as TWO meals for each person - no, thank you.  We got lots of time with Belle, Cinderella, Snow White, Ariel and Sleeping Beauty at the Epcot one.)
• We made sure to make time for swimming.  Our hotel had a little pool near each building and one big pool in the center of the resort.  I had read something about how when you ask kids what their favorite part of the Disney vacation was, the majority of kids say swimming at the hotel.  I know that can drive parents crazy (hello, we can swim at the rec center 2 miles from our house!), but Becca loves the water, too, so we made sure to swim 3 times or so.  The pools are heated, but even so, in the first week of March we had to watch the weather to schedule our trips to the pool.  Once it was so cold that Becca's lips turned blue, but she still refused to get out.  (We went all responsible parent on her and made her get out anyway.)
• One of the beautiful things about going to Disney with a kid Becca's age (3.5) is that if we didn't tell her it was there, she didn't know - so if we knew we weren't going to do something (ride the Teacups, for instance - I wasn't going near them nauseous, and John's no fan either), she didn't know what she was missing.  That mindset also freed us up to take it slowly, since we didn't have to do everything. 
• Don't believe people who tell you to skip Epcot with little kids.  Of course, Becca is our little scientist, so it was no surprise that she'd be into things like Innoventions and the Imagination Lab at the end of Figment, but Epcot turned out to be her favorite park.  We rode Nemo 3 times, Figment 3 times and Spaceship Earth (in the big ball) 3 times.  She loved Fantasy Land, of course (with Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, and It's a Small World), but she picked Epcot when she got to decide where we were going. 
• We downloaded (and actually paid for) an app from touringplans.com - it was awesome.  It gave us real-time wait-times for every attraction in the parks.  That made it really easy for us to avoid disappointment - instead of telling Becca we were going to such and such ride, getting there and finding that the line was too long, we were able to check the wait times and give her options.  (And yeah, she definitely didn't understand the concept of going to a ride to check the wait time - if we walked to it, we had to ride it). 

Okay, enough words.  Here's a Disney photobomb!

Okay, this post is getting ridiculously huge, and I'm only halfway through the pictures, so I'll save the rest for another post. 

Things I Forgot To Say: TennCare Decision

Not sure how I forgot to tell you all this one, but Becca gets to keep her TennCare!  I went for our interview last month, waited forever, then sat in a cubicle while the agent typed a bunch of numbers into the computer without even looking at me.  After a few minutes, he turned to me and said, "She's accepted!"  I said, "What?  Just like that?" and he smiled and said, "Yep.  She's good for another year."  I'm not even kidding when I say that he looked like Santa Claus in that moment.  This news is SUCH a relief to us.  When I told John, he was so happy he felt like doing this:

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Hospital Fun

Our time at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital recently wasn't all gloom and doom. Becca manages to have fun everywhere she goes, whether it's...

exploring underneath the hospital crib....

having a bath in the sink...

making the rounds, waving like a princess from my wagon chariot...

getting tucked into bed with all of my friends...

being adorable with Mommy in my 4th of July dress...

playing with my borrowed naked baby...

(thus started our obsession with "ba-bie")

hanging out with my buddy Daxton...

(Seriously, could he be any more handsome?)

meeting a baby with a mic-key button just like mine...

(Sorry, not the best picture, but here's what the button looks like up close.)

snuggling on the bed with Daddy after surgery...

or, our favorite, playing on the dragon playground on the 6th floor!

Riding the dragon!

(Playing our favorite new game, "I see," as in, "I see Becca!")

(Itsy Bitsy Spider with Daddy..."out came the sun...")

It's a lovely day when you're with Be-ecca!

Family Re-Union Video

Remember that conference John and I keynoted at Vanderbilt a few weeks ago? They've posted the video of our speech! Visit this site and click on "Keynote." The first 6:30 is the CEO of Vanderbilt Children's Hospital sharing some thoughts and introducing us. He also sang "Happy Birthday" to Becca. Very sweet. John and I speak for about 26 minutes before taking questions from the audience. Lots of the information will be familiar to you guys, but it gives a nice recap of Becca's story and our journey. You may need to grab some tissues, but enjoy!

Holy Saturday - the Secular Version

I'm finally getting around to catching up on some blogging while John entertains the munchkin. She and I are still a bit under the weather, but we've been checked out by the pros, who have decided that we have a nasty cold virus that we can expect to kick fully in 7-14 days. 7-14 days? Really? Who has time for this? We might just go back under house arrest because it's more fun than being sick. Okay, not really, but I do appreciate my efforts to keep us healthy these past two years even more now that we aren't very healthy. Next baby (still no news there), preemie or not, is staying somewhat isolated for at least a few months!

Let's reflect on more amusing times...like Easter! I know it's been over a month, but I can't let an Easter dress the celebration of our Lord's resurrection sneak by without a blog post!

First, a liturgical lesson: Easter is a season. Easter Sunday is a day. The 40 days preceding Easter (not counting Sundays) is the season of Lent. The last week of Lent/the week immediately preceding Easter is Holy Week. It begins with Palm Sunday, and we Methodists typically celebrate Maundy Thursday, focusing on Jesus' last supper with his disciples and the institution of the Lord's Supper/Communion, and Good Friday, commemorating Christ's cruxifiction (yeah, not the most uplifting service, but a very important part of our faith nonetheless). Holy Saturday is the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. For the disciples, it was a day of grieving, of second-guessing, and of anxiety about how what it meant that their leader, their rabbi, their friend, who they thought would bring about the reign of God or at least the freedom of their people, had been brutally executed by the state.

For us, it's a day of Easter egg hunts.

Just for the record, I think that Easter egg hunts should be saved for sometime in the Easter season. An Easter egg hunt at the very tail end of Lent is jumping the gun, skating past the uncertainty of the day and into the fluffy goodness of marshmellow eggs. I wonder if that's a particularly American tradition; it would be typical of our collective tendancy towards instant (or at least hurried) gratification. Of course, I'm not really sure what hidden candy has to do with Easter anyway, but hey, I'm game. So jump the gun we did, and we had a great time doing it!

John's parents (aka Nana Dana and G-Diddy) wanted to get Becca an Easter present, so I suggested a membership to the Nashville Zoo, which we had to try out immediately, of course (see above: instant gratification). We joined the throngs (which turned out to be much bigger than my infection-conscious mind had anticipated!) for EggstravaganZOO 2010. After waiting out a rainy morning, we got there just in time for Becca's first Easter egg hunt. It was for kids 2 & under, but they kept announcing that the kids had to be old enough to retrieve the eggs on their own. I got really self-conscious about this, but refused to deny my daughter (and, okay, me) her shot at her first egg hunt, regardless of the looks I was sure I was getting from other parents questioning my decision to bring a baby onto the field. I wanted to wear a sign that said, "She's a toddler, she's just not toddling and she's tiny. And, by the way, she could kick your oaf of a kid's butt so stop judging me!" Apparently I still have issues. Who knew?

While they finished prepping the field (driving around on a golf cart, flinging plastic eggs everywhere), we got a visit from a very special friend...the Easter Bunny! Becca loved her (him? what gender is the Easter Bunny in your family?)! She wouldn't stop hugging her. I think the E.B. loved Becca, too, because she didn't seem to want to stop hugging her. It was adorable. See for yourself:

Finally it was time for the big event. Still wallowing in my issues, I was determined that Becca was going to walk onto the field:

Kids were scurrying out in front of and all around her, and I quickly realized that at this rate, she would never encounter an egg, let alone prove to the nosy masses who had nothing better to do that glare at the baby on the field and her pushy mother (because surely they weren't just enjoying the moment with their own kids) that she could, in fact, retrieve the eggs herself, as the voice from above (or the megaphone) had mandated. I got over myself, scooped her up, carried her further infield and plopped her down in a pile of eggs.

This approach worked much better, and she did, in fact, retrieve 5 and 1/2 eggs for herself, like a "real toddler." (Again, with the issues. I know.) Also like a "real toddler," she had more fun taking them out of the bucket and examining them than collecting more. (Wisely, the zoo left the eggs empty and handed out a standard goody bag when you returned your eggs. If she had been able to open it up and discover something actually inside the egg, it would have been all over after the first one. We're a fan of crinkly plastic things these days.)

Once she and I got over the gymnastics of it all (physical for her, emotional for me), we had a great time. It seems that every first with her is still quite an emotional moment for me. Her first Easter egg hunt! Sure, she didn't look or act like all the other kids, but she did it, and I got to share it with her! Now that I think about it, it would have been almost exactly two years before that egg hunt that I had been told that she would never make it, and there she was gathering 5 1/2 eggs in her Easter bucket! What a girl - and what a happy mama!

After we fought the crowds for an overpriced (but surprisingly tasty) zoo lunch, we made the rounds and checked out the animals. I might or might not have spent most of my time searching for the golden eggs they (supposedly) had hidden around the zoo (never did find one!), but Becca loved the meerkats (so cute with popping out of the holes and disappearing again!) and tried to jump into the koi pond. The big kids in our group loved the red pandas and the clouded leopards. For a zoo that is only 13 years old, the Nashville Zoo is pretty fabulous! It's just the right size for families with young kids, and they still have plenty of room to grow. In fact, they are soon opening two new exhibits: flamingos (fun!) and tapirs (seen recently with Jack Hanna on Letterman!). If you are local, I highly recommend a family membership! We've already gone back once (with a professional photo shoot, but that's another story!), so we've almost made up the purchase price (er...Nana Dana and G-Diddy's purchase price, that is). Grandparents, it's a great gift! (You can check out purchase options here.)

After the zoo, we re-introduced the family to another (relatively new) Nashville tradition: Las Paletas. Yum! Becca was even bold enough to try a few bites, which was great feeding therapy. Perhaps once we are closer to town we should engage in more frequent feeding therapy. Becca particularly loved hanging out in the backpack and dripping popsicle on daddy's neck. She loves being tall in the backpack! (By the way, I got the backpack at a consignment sale for $12. Suh-weet!)

I can't say that we spent Holy Saturday reflecting on Christ's sacrifice and renewing our commitment to his service, but we did have a darn good time and enjoyed being with each other, and I think he'd kind of like that.

S.W.A.M.P.E.D...for Good Reasons

No, it doesn't stand for anything, but I just wanted to make the word longer.

Sorry to me MIA. We have been swamped around here.

Silly me scheduled a book fair the week of the March for Babies, so I was running around like a crazy women last week getting ready for and, um, executing both events. We had a great time at the March for Babies! We had 18 people on Itty Bitty Becca's Team come out for at least part of the festivities, and as a team, we raised over $1500! I haven't gotten final word on what the entire event raised, but I feel like we did our part, thanks to all of you guys who donated, bought t-shirts, and walked with us! (If you bought a t-shirt, by the way, I'm hoping to mail them out this week. Sorry I'm a bit tardy with them. If you haven't heard, we've been swamped around here.) I'll give the March for Babies its own post at some point, complete with pictures. I also need to post some pictures of Becca in her Easter finery, too - don't think I've forgotten! Anyhow, the book fair and the march (and the awful sinus infection that resulted from the combination of little sleep and lots of pollen) have kept this SuperMom pretty busy, but so has something else...

We're moving!

This summer, John will become the associate pastor at Christ United Methodist Church in Franklin, Tennessee. We are really excited about this move. We will definitely miss folks in Bethpage (and if you are reading this blog, you can be assured that you are one of folks we will miss most - I know who you Becca fans are!), not to mention the spacious parsonage and the vast and gorgeous yard, but we Methodist ministers do tend to stay on the move. I, for one, am beyond thrilled that we get to stay in Tennessee (there was some question about moving back to Kentucky for a while there), though I know that John will continue to miss his beloved commonwealth. I'm just thankful that even though we're from different states (and, more importantly as Methodist ministers, annual conferences), Kentucky and Tennessee border each other, so we'll easily be able to get back to the Bluegrass to visit friends and family. But enough caveats. Let me tell you some of why we/I am thrilled about this move:

• The staff at the new church - The lead pastor is Carol Cavin-Dillon. Um, to say that I'm a fan of Carol would be quite an understatement. Carol was my pastor in my late teens and early 20's, in a time of much emotional turbulence and general confusion. Carol then became my employer (and the best boss ever) when her son was born and she returned to work, boldly leaving sweet Tate in my care. Carol pointed me towards Candler and the most amazing graduate school experience I could imagine (complete with a husband by the end of it). In fact, Carol secured said husband for me by marrying us...and by dolling up her son to be our ring bearer...and delivering the best wedding homily ever. So, yeah, I'm a fan. A fan +, perhaps. I'm really excited to see John and her working together because I think their "gifts and graces" (as we say in preacher-talk) will really pair well together. AND the rest of the staff is fabulous as well. I went to high school with the youth minister, Paul Bonner, and he and his family are incredible...not to mention a lot of fun. We grew up in the same youth group as well - I think he actually graduated high school the year that Carol came to our church. (His mom, incidentally, was my friend in faith for Confirmation, and one of her paintings hangs in our bedroom.) And the mother of another friend of mine from high school is on the administrative staff. Crazy connections. I'm really excited about meeting the rest of the staff as well. The music minister literally helped write one of the UM worship books.
• The church itself - is one that I'm very excited about attending. When you don't get to pick the church that your family attends (assuming that you'd like your family to attend the same church), it's kind of a crapshoot regarding whether or not you are serving at a church you would choose to attend. This one (like Bethpage), I'm really excited to be a part of, and now that the doctors have given us the green light to mingle with the world, I'm looking forward to getting involved...and to signing Becca up for the Mustard Seed Choir when she turns 3. How cute is that name? Perfect for our tiny girl.
• The area - Franklin is much closer to Nashville than Bethpage. That means, of course, that it's closer to Vanderbilt, to family, and to women I've been friends with since I was 10 years old. That's exciting. The church itself is just a few miles away from my parents' old house. (They have since retired to East Tennessee.) I used to drive by the church all the time to get to my high school boyfriend's house. I worked at the Target 1.3 miles away. (Yes, I have been a fan of the big red store for quite some time.) Really, it's like going home for me.
• However, we can't afford to buy a house around there, so we've found another great area in which we are hoping to buy a home. Spring Hill is south of Franklin and actually straddles the county line. It's full of young professionals with young kids and has not only a Target, but a SuperTarget. I can just hear Kristen Wiig proclaiming, "Heaven has a TARGET!" (Wow...they really should pay me for these endorsements.) We're looking for houses on the Williamson County side of town, since they have the best public schools. This is particularly important to us because a) we value education; b) we're public school kids; and c) Becca rolls to the public school system for her special ed services when she turns 3 - which, unbelievably, happens next summer! Whoa! (Services for kids 0-3 are provided through Tennesse's Early Intervention System; once kiddos turn 3, it's the local school system that provides services, like special education pre-k's for which Becca is likely to qualify.)

That's the highlights. (Funny how my highlight reel is always at least as long as regular posts, huh?) Of course, the difficult bits will be the actual moving process (though it's always amusing to hear what the movers have to say about our, um, extensive book collection), switching therapists (sad!) and dealing with the inevitable insurance issues that come with switching providers (and since Becca's therapy costs somewhere around $4300 a month, we've got to make sure we've got the kinks worked out), finding her a new inclusive preschool to start a few days a week this summer (we had one lined up in Gallatin), saying goodbyes to dear friends up here (but we won't be far away, remember!), and, oh yeah, finding a house, which is where most of our "free time" has been going lately. We've made 4 trips down to Spring Hill (1 hour and 15 minutes away) with Becca in tow, scoping out the area and looking at houses, and we're really hoping to get something going soon. (And just in case you are curious, we don't qualify for any of the tax credits because we have been out of our house for only 2 years - you have to have not owned a house in 3 years in order to qualify for the first-time buyer credit (which, oddly, has nothing to do with actually being a first-time buyer), and we obviously haven't lived in our own house for 5 years to qualify for the step-up credit. This scenario is very difficult for my discount-oriented mind to swallow.) So if you see of any houses for sale (for cheap!) in Williamson County, give us a shout! We've got a wonderful realtor, but things like houses for sale by owner aren't really publicized in the usual way, so if you are down that way, be our eyes for us!

I'll keep you posted, and I promise more Becca cuteness very soon! Here's a little dose for you...further evidence that we take early literacy skills seriously in the Hill house:

p.s. All this busyness has served as a wonderful distraction from the emptiness of my womb. Trying a new medicine -- no, an old one -- Metformin. We'll see how it goes!