But I've got one, thanks to smartertm.

Free Rice! A vocab game that donates 10 grains of rice through the United Nations for every vocabulary question you get correct. The words get progressively more difficult as you get them right, and then easier when you start getting them wrong, ending up at a level that is always moderately challenging without being ridiculous.

So far smartertm is pwning me. I'm consistently around level 39, and the highest I've gotten so far is 42.

The donations are paid by tiny ads at the bottom that are fairly unobtrusive, so don't worry that you're just going to be ad-blinged by playing the game. I got up to 420 grains of rice today before I decided I *really* needed to get some work done.

So I was pretty sure when I married Andrew that we wanted kids eventually. But it's always a matter of timing, isn't it? I was in a Ph.D. program, wanting to go into academia, and where do you fit a kid into all that schedule?

One of the things that finally lit a fire under us happened at my cousin Melissa's wedding. We were sitting at a table with my grandparents, and my grandpa looked up at me and asked me if I was going to give him some great-grandchildren before he died.

Now part of this question was certainly my grandfather's trademark offbeat humor, as he was in no immediate danger of dying at the time. But he certainly had also been frail for a while. And I guess it removed the innocence of "my family is going to live forever," and I really wanted my child to know all of their great-grandparents on my side. (Jefferson has one great-grandparent on Andrew's side, but he doesn't have much to do with the family.)

When Jefferson was born, my grandpa wasn't doing very well. We'd already said that we were having Christmas at our home in Arizona, so we packed our six-week old into the car and drove to Kansas for Thanksgiving. Neither of us wanted to risk the possibility of Jefferson never meeting his great-grandfather.

Well Grandpa pulled through that time, and he got to see Jefferson at many family get-togethers to come.

When we went home to Kansas this last time, we knew Grandpa was in the hospital, but it wasn't until the family was chatting before Jefferson's birthday parties that we realized how serious it had been. That a doctor had suggested putting him in hospice, because he wasn't coming home again. We fretted over the possibility of the hospital not allowing Jefferson to visit, but we were all able to go and see him in the hospital.

And while he looked terrible, it didn't seem like we were there to say goodbyes after all. He was frail, yes, down to some ridiculously low weight, and a little unsettling without his dentures, which the hospital had lost. But he was talkative, downright chipper, and chatted with us for quite a while. We left talking about how the hospital should be feeding him more (while he was there he was asking for ice cream, and at his weight it seemed like they should be feeding him anything he would eat), but confident that he would be home again soon.

In the days after, my grandma says that grandpa would frequently burst out with "Wow, that Jefferson is a cute kid!" He was always a baby man, and Jefferson had been at his most charming on his visit.

I will always be glad that I could give him that. That we were there for that visit, both as a good memory for us and as something bright in his final days. I know he was so bored there in the hospital, vision too poor to watch tv or read, always just waiting for the next visitor.

I'm glad he wasn't alone when he died.

And I'm glad that most of the little fractures in our family disappeared long enough for us to get together to remember him.