I finally did it!

Drum roll please...

Announcing Elisa Partridge's long awaited family blog! (please hold back the applause)

I know that many of you have been wondering what the goings on have been since we left our long time home in Utah, for the Urban life of Wichita, Kansas. Well, since we have been here for nearly 2 months now, you are all in for an earful, er, eyeful.

We arrived in Wichita on Friday, August 8th, and since then, have been very busy getting our lives together here. We've had to find doctor's, insurace, school's, and we are still settling in. I found an OB pretty quickly, but have yet to find Halle a doctor. Since we are living off of student loans and Wade's measly $6000/yr stipend, we had to apply for medicaid, which was expidited for me and baby in utero, but we are still waiting to get medicaid for Halle, and Wade isn't eligible.

Not having medical for Halle, I have had to put off finding her a doctor. I did try in the the past to find her a pediatrician, but even if they were taking patients with medicaid, they had met their quota and would not allow new ones. That has led me to finding a family doctor, but I decided not to attempt it until her medicaid comes through.

As for Wade's insurance, he is able to get his through school for a reasonable price. Now he just needs to find an eye doctor, general physician, and neurologist. I offered to find doctors for him, given his packed schedule, but he insists on finding them on his own. Men...

I have seen my new OB several times now. I really like her. She's been really good at picking up where my last doctor left off. She has looked into past concerns, and she has scheduled my c-section. Why a c-section you ask? Well, Halle was delivered by c-section, and we felt there would be less possible complications if we went ahead and did another one. Halle's sister's delivery is scheduled for October 15th, which is just 2 weeks from tomorrow!

Now, I bet you are wondering what the name is going to be. Well, you'll just have to wait until my next post! Oh, and for those of you who weren't aware, it's a girl, hence "Halle's sister" above.

I have been wanting to get Halle into some sort of educational environment since we got here, but it's turned out to be a difficult task. For one, we can't really afford to pay for her to go to school. Preschool, or Pre-K as they call it here, is free at the public schools, but unfortunately she missed the age cut off to get in this year. I do, however, due to our low income, have the option of getting her into headstart (that's pre-pre-k) but the school she would go to doesn't have any openings as of now, and she has to have her shots up to date, which isn't possible right now because of the medicaid situation. I do try to keep her busy though. I just bought a bunch of stuff for her birthday to teach her the ABC's and 123's, and I take her to a play group 2 or 3 times a week. I don't hear "Mom, I wanna do something..." quite as often anymore.

Before this gets so long that you give up reading, I just wanted to announce one more thing. I have recently been called to be the 2nd counselor, or Enrichment counselor, in the Relief Society in our Ward! This is very intimidating for me since a)I've never been in a position of leadership before, and b)I'm going to have a newborn while I'm doing this! Eek! Luckily, I was on the enrichment committee back in Utah so at least I'm not going in completely clueless.

I hope you find this worth the wait and the time it will take to read. Next post: Fun things we've done since we arrived, complete with pictures and videos! And I promise it will be before the baby is born. Stay tuned!