We are home.

We made it back home safely, and I recommend that every parent try a 20-30 hour journey by planes just for kicks.
Our trip was extended by nearly a week when Mina caught roseola or something similar that left her dotted for a while; Korean Air extended our tickets for free and we took the opportunity to visit Mika and Adam up in Monterey/Pacific Grove/Seaside. Details will probably follow in some fashion.
To everybody – family, friends, and even random strangers – who made our trip possible and enjoyable, thank you. It meant a lot to be able to expose the kids to all of you and yours.
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Meanwhile, my Crown lies immobile in the driveway, battery dead (even though I disconnected it before we left).
Our Cefiro is apparently finished at the body shop, and we’ll go check it out today. Speaking of which, I’m up at six in the morning because Max stayed up all night planting plastic animals in strategic spots where I will step on them later.
Need sleep.
Will report back soon.

Return delayed?

Mina has broken out in red dots all over her face and back… Roseola? Fifth disease? Measles?
Going back on the 27th does not look good – there’s no way they’ll let her through looking like this.
More later.
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Who knows how this will turn out. Sometimes you just have to relinquish control and let things be how they be. You know, just let it flow. Like this:

iBaby

I used to be an apple weenie, but then I decided to live in the third world, and as we all know, apple doesn’t care about poor people. So it’s been a revelation visiting home and using my sister’s iPhone for a week when she was on a cruise, and to a lesser extent, my mom’s MacBook to aggregate photos and video from several different sources.
The iPhone was pretty cool and three killer apps for me were Google Maps (although I tried the Android version on my cousin’s phone and it was even better), Gmail, and a Mafia Wars-type world war game that I got addicted to in a frighteningly crack-like way.
What really tickled me, though, was seeing an iPad for the first time. My cousin S got free tickets for Stars on Ice (which people still call Ice Capades) a few days ago and invited us to come. We took the babies and I had to check in our stroller at the Guest Link office at Staples Center before we could enter the stands. While I was getting my claim stub, a woman came in with her iPad, sobbing. She explained that the ushers were insisting that she had to check in her “baby” because she couldn’t have it in the stands. When I left, she was still trying to convince the clerk to make sure nothing happened to her baby and going so far as to wrap it in her cardigan.