Seattle is a go!

I talked with the nurse from Seattle today and she told me the neurologist thinks I qualify and wants me to come up to be screened. Yay! She called me last night and wanted to confirm that I am in the 3.0-5.5 EDSS range, so after I talked to her, Ben measured the distance from the kitchen to the living room walls (30 feet), and had me walk 11 lengths which is 100 meters, and I could do it! Even navigating the turns. So I emailed Bernie back and told her I defiitely can walk 100 m without my cane, and today she called to tell me the neurologist approved me. She's supposed to call tomorrow to let me know when he has an availability to have me come up and be screened. Probably the 2nd or 3rd week in January.
She also said again that once M.D. Anderson is ready to recruit patients (or Baylor), I can be transferred back here. I hope they can get things started down here quickly so I can spend 3 months in Houston rather than in Seattle. So as long as I can keep at this level for the next 3-4 weeks, I should be ok.
I had a neuro appointment today and we talked about maybe doing monthly 1-day Solumedrol pulses if I start noticing a decline, so that's always a possibility. I just got done with the prednisone on Tuesday, though, and I'm not in any hurry to get back on more steroids, so I'm not going to do it unless I start noticing more trouble walking. My physical therapist says I'm doing really well and wants me to continue, so I'll probably get another 3 weeks of PT which should help as well.

In other news, something I've been dreading finally happened. I don't know how I managed to go nearly 6 1/2 years before dealing with this, so I should be grateful. Yesterday afternoon Brigham took a pair of scissors to his hair. Not a big deal, I had actually just cut his hair so it was pretty short anyway, but there are definitely two noticable bald-ish spots on his head. I think Brigham was surprised I noticed. He was very contrite and told me he wouldn't do it again. He is such a sweet boy, I hate getting after him about anything.
Today we desperately needed to do a massive toy cleanup, and Mosey and Joseph were both "too tired" to help. So they both had to go lay in their beds, and Brigham helped me pick up all the toys. And last night as he was going up to bed, he came up to me and kissed me on the cheek and said, "Thank you for making my fish blanket, mom." (I made each boy a blanket for Christmas). Isn't he sweet? I feel bad heaping praise on Brigham and not heaping equal praise on his brothers, but I gotta be honest, at the moment, Brigham definitely has the corner on sweetness.

AND, we are finally the proud owners of just ONE house!! Yahoo!! One year to the day (isn't that weird?) that we listed our Florida house, it finally closed. Ben has spared me the gory details of the final negotiations over the past few weeks, but did assure me that we got out of the house without actually having to write a check to the bank, so that's a good thing. We just won't think about the tens of thousands of dollars swallowed up this past year paying mortgage on an empty house... If only we had known a year ago what we know now! But you know, as unfortunate as all of that has been, the other stuff going on in our lives has helped to give us a little perspective. Money is just money. There's a lot of other stuff that can happen in life that is a lot more important that making or losing money. A year ago if I had known how things would end up with that house, I probably would have been pretty devastated. But this year? I don't really care. I'm just glad not to have that debt hanging over our heads anymore. Ben and I had really been struggling with knowing what we should do. Should we keep trying to sell the house? Should we rent it out and wait till the market improved? When our bishop gave us the blessing that our house would sell soon, that really answered that question. So it was just a matter of what we needed to do to insure that the house would sell "soon." I think I had been ready to make that plunge for a few months, but Ben wasn't quite there yet. But once he made that decision and called our realtor to lower the price it was pretty amazing how quickly we got an interested buyer!! Today the loans actually cleared from our account, so it is officially OVER. Phew!!!

Ok, now I better get some real food for my boys. I think they've eaten nothing but ice cream cones and Christmas treats this whole day. Disgraceful!