IRA headache

[Guest joeyboy]

Thanks in advance for the any advice. Here's the situation:

In October 2000, I opened and fully funded ROTH IRAs for both my wife and me. Come 2000 tax filing time in April of 2001, we found that due to our income and ROTH phase out rules we could not fully contribute to ROTHs. So we recharacterized a portion of each roth to traditional IRAs.

So we filed taxes for 2000 each having a ROTH and a TRADITIONAL.

We then filed taxes for 2001 and we had each fully funded our ROTHs for 2001 (which we were allowed to due this time)

Now we are in 2002 and my question is this: can I make the traditional IRAs amounts (which we were "forced" to create because of our one-time high income level in 2000) into ROTH IRAs this year.

Or is there some rule that since they went from ROTH to TRADITIONAL that they cant go back to ROTH?

Or I have I simply passed out from exhaustion?

thanks again.