Laura has a doll on which she practices all the medical procedures which she must undergo. She has had a lot of practice explaining her condition. When she described how her disease had come back, this time in the form of an earache, she sounded far more knowledgeable than most adults.

Laura said she will eventually have a tutor, but for now she is homework-free. Even so, she said she misses school. "When I'm in school sometimes I wish I was sick so I wouldn't have to be there. But when I'm in the hospital getting poked, I wish I was at school with all my friends," she said.

Katie O'Kiefe

Although many of the patients who completed Tuesday's move face long-term illnesses and surgery, some of them receive positive news instead. Laura's roommate, Katie O'Kiefe, a 12-year old from Everett, Massachusetts, said she will go home today, reassured by doctors and tests that her leukemia has not come back and she is still in remission.

Katie was first diagnosed as having leukemia seven years ago and has been in remission since then. Last Wednesday when she suffered seizures, she was rushed to the new emergency room at Children's. But her seizures were diagnosed as a neurological disorder that is unrelated to cancer.

The move completed, the empty buildings of the "old" Children's Hospital will now house offices, clinical labs, the hemo-therapy unit and an expanded physical therapy department.

The hospital will use two floors of the old building as "quasi-dormitory space" for parents of Intensive Care patients who are too sick to have their parents sleep in their rooms, Peck said.

Tuesday was both "exhilarating and poignant for the Children's family," Peck said. "It was both a beginning and an end for the people who have been at Children's for a long time. They will never take care of another patient in these buildings, where there have been patients for up to 50 years."