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Life here's going well. Work is going well--I just am finishing up an elective month in neuro-pathology and next month have an elective in headache/pain. So, elective months are easier so stress level low. Being the chief is getting hard at times, yelling at the troops to do things. They don't like being told things.

Katie is about to kill the girls some days. Even though Rose turned 3 yesterday and we cut her some slack, she was still not acting good enough. Katie almost cancelled the birthday. But when she's acting good she's doing great. For some reason her favorite color is purple (I hope she outgrows that!) and is learning things with Katie. She, Katie and Peter go to "little church" on Tuesdays when Mary Ann is in school and I hear she does great there.

Mary Ann is doing great. Sometimes I don't believe Katie about what Mary Ann is doing. Supposedly the teacher can read a sentence out loud and Mary Ann can write it. She has done a project about mammals and wrote 6 things that mammals do/have, and even now can still recite them (which she often does). She's reading short words fairly well. I really can't believe it. We're worried that when she goes to Kindergarten next year she'll just be bored the whole time.

Peter is also doing well. He's rolling over and making cute sounds. He keeps growing. We (ok, actually Katie) started putting him in the bounce-a-roo and now his feet hit the ground and he likes to bounce. He used to sleep from ~9pm to 5am, but now wakes up at midnight. So, while that is still great compared to most kids, it's definitely not letting Katie get as much sleep as she was getting.

I recently went to San Diego for a conference which was great, except being alone really sucked. Katie took the kids to Dayton and I hear they had a great time. It's fun that our kids all play together so well. I hope we can all end up closer together in the future.

We also just went to the Wisconsin Dells last weekend for another conference. Mitzi went too and really was indispensible in helping us watch the kids at the water park, especially when I was in conference.

We're thinking about renovating our upstairs bathroom. The shower stall got another crack in it so we want to just pull out the shower. We want to convert the tub (which has no shower) to a regular shower/tub. We'd like to replace the tub. We will tear down the wall between teh sink and the current shower stall and convert the sink to a 2-basin sink by elongating it into the shower stall space. We've had one guy come look at it and don't have his bid, but some lady today came and gave us a $8000-$15,000 rough bid. Wow...how in the world can it be that much, and how can her estimate be so wide? If it will really cost that much...uh, anybody want to come up and help me renovate a bathroom? Really, if it costs that much I'll just rip out the shower stall myself, install one of those attachable shower heads to the current tub, and just rip out part of the wall and just get someone to install the new sink and cabinets. Crazy.

We've got some pics of my San Diego trip up, we'll get more up soon including Rose's birthday party. Don't forget to check out the youtube videos--we post videos there every so often.