Emptying pockets of random

We had a minivacation that started Wednesday afternoon and ended Monday. We hit the road and an hour into the trip, Willa started to vomit. Optimistically, I chalked it up to car sickness. Turns out, we were 2 adults, 2 kids, and 2 dogs on a trip with a rather sociable flu-bug. There was no fun. Wait, there was 2 minutes of fun that involved a watermelon (and if I don't post about that later in the week - with photos- bug me about it). This little bug danced from Willa to me, and then to Henry, and somehow got to Jim on Mackinac Island before getting to my mom and then my dad.

The silver lining was that when the kids were sleeping or otherwise engaged, I got to read a book. From one cover to another in a few days. I haven't done that in a very long time. I read the Kite Runner. It did to my psyche what starting an exercise regime does to a physical body. It was painful to read, but important. It's a wonderfully heartbreaking story. Read it.

Changing the subject to a few random points:

Mr. Sinki = smarty pants. Check this out: 6 classes down in his Master's program, and dude's got a 4.0 GPA. I'm so proud of Jim.

I spent some time yesterday reading through the 2006 posts just to see how our lives were when Willa was Henry's age. Turns out we're kind of reliving late November of 2006 in the sleep department. Some other quick calculations show that Henry and Willa were the same age when first teeth showed up and when they became mobile by crawling.

Grand Rapids probably went to bed with a bottle of wine (I don't know... GR pals, is GR a wine city? beer? the hard stuff?) last night after a very tough day. Before the sun came up, a GR landmark restaurant burned down. And then a very large water main downtown broke, closing the street. [Dear Amway: that will teach you! Trying to keep the public from gazing at your fireworks show...] And then the food court at Woodland mall had a small fire that made the mall close down for a while. And I won't post a link there...