On Vacations, Doctors, Hospital Visits and Mice (both good and bad)

   It's been an eventful few weeks around here. Lets start with the hospital visit. As some of you may know, Amanda had a brief trip to the ER a week or so ago (6 hours in the waiting room, 20 minutes in an actual room.) She has a bit of an abnormal heartbeat, but nothing much to worry about according to the doctor. She is following up on it to make sure everything is good.
   Now for the mice (bad) portion of this post. We seem to have a bit on an infestation. We usually get 1 or 2 when the weather turns colder, but this year I've caught 6 this week alone. We may need some professionals this year unfortunately.
   Now for the mice (good) portion. Things are progressing very well on our preparations  for our trip to Walt Disney World. Lily is learning some of the characters (although most of them she just calls Minnie) and Ari is getting very hyper. We've been taking them over to the airport playground which is just outside the fence at BWI. It gets nice and loud there as all the planes take off and land so we can get them used to the noise. We've also changed our return flight so that we no longer have a layover. So we now have nonstop flights for both directions. Overall the cost per person round trip went from $225(original booked flights. Both ways had layovers) to $262 (nonstop there, layover back) to $292(no layovers!). Not too bad overall and I love that you can keep changing your flights whenever you want with Southwest. We still keep our eyes out for better flights at a good price, but we're pretty set right now. Also, the flight there now gets us there around 5 hours earlier than our original schedule.
   We visited Ari's doctor recently to get her back checkup and talk about the next round of surgery. We were hoping for it to be pushed back as far as possible. The next one could have been as early as the first week of November. Dr. Ain said she is doing great and she didn't need another surgery until January or February. So no surgery until well after the trip and Christmas. Also, she's been cleared for bike riding, playing soccer and most non-contact activities. As a reward for Ari, we took the money we made from a recent yard sale and bought her a Strawberry Shortcake bike that she's been riding when its nice enough out.  She's still not very good at it, but she has the idea. The hills around here are really hard for her (both up and down) so that makes it a little difficult to get any good amount of practice time in.