Great news!

After almost three weeks, Bunny has been found! He apparently spent two weeks OUTSIDE at Camp Tahkodah before being found by the caretaker. We understand Bunny is very dirty but on his way back to us. Jenna has been doing OK without him, but has occasionally asked for him before declaring a few days ago, "I'm going back to camp to get Bunny."

Now from the "Is This Weird?" department:

Julia and I got our hair cut yesterday. We had to go to a new place because no one was answering the phone all day at the place we usually go. My appt. was yesterday morning. When it was time to pay, the woman who cut my hair just had me make the check out to her first name because she said her last name is hard to spell. I also have a name that is hard for people to spell and pronounce, so this didn't seem strange to me. When I brought Julia back for her appt. after school, a different person cut her hair. When I was writing the check, he said to just write his first name. Then he gave me his business card, which just said "Terrence." What's with this first-name only business? Do they think we are going to stalk them or something?

Note -- all this check-writing is due to my debit card's PIN number getting messed up, and my bank taking a long time to fix it.

My Hannah Montana luck continues. Julia wants to be HM for Halloween. She has an outfit, but I waited until a ridiculously late date to start looking for a wig. All the stores have been sold out, and all the online places have them back-ordered. I started getting desperate yesterday and decided to check with Party City in Little Rock. Turns out this store ordered 100 of them, and out of 400-something Party City locations in the country, the LR location is the only one that got them in. (This is what Mr. Party City employee told me, anyway.) He also said it's good that I came in and got one when I did, because people have been buying 30 at a time to sell them on Ebay.


Here's the picture from the package. I don't even think the wig looks like Hannah Montana's hair, but hey -- at least it's something.

Best Friends

We just got back from this year's Best Friends Retreat at Camp Tahkodah. I drove up with Julia and Jenna on Saturday and didn't get to participate in much of the retreat activities, but it seemed to go really well. The guest speaker was our friend Tquan, and it was great to see him again.

Speaking of best friends, we have lost Jenna's. "Bunny" has been a member of our family almost as long as Jenna has. He was a gift to her from her Great-Aunt Wanda and her Great-Mamaw a few months after her birth. Jenna hasn't slept a night without Bunny since she was about nine months old. That's Bunny resting on Jenna's chest in this picture from about six months ago:



This morning at camp, Chad had packed our stuff up and Jenna had apparently removed Bunny from her backpack because I remember Julia saying that Bunny was sitting on a chair in the next room, which is the camp infirmary. That was the very last time I thought of Bunny until we were on our way home. I called Chad, who was in Searcy by this time in another vehicle. He drove back to camp and Bunny was nowhere to be found. Once we got home, I called three other adults who had been staying and/or working near the infirmary, but none of them had seen Bunny. Chad finally made it to our church and didn't find Bunny in any of the stuff other church members had brought back from camp. I couldn't reach anyone who works at the camp so I left a message.

Through a little internet research, I learned that Bunny probably came from JC Penney. The two I called here don't carry them anymore, but I did find another Bunny on Ebay.If the other Penney's in Little Rock and the camp staff don't turn anything up, we may be sneaking the Ebay bunny into our home and passing him off as the old one.

When Jenna asked for Bunny tonight, we told her he was going to stay at camp for a few more days and that she could go pick another animal from her room to sleep with tonight. She smiled and said,"OK!" and ran to her room and picked out a pink bear. Then Chad put her to bed while Julia and I prayed for God to please, please, please bring Bunny back to us. I realize Jenna is taking this better than I am. But I guess that since he had become special to her, he had become special to me, too.