I think the family may finally be healthy – after Kaya’s GI bug, Laney got it and was out of commission for a few days, then I feel mildly ill (thankfully spared the worst of it that the girls saw). Everyone was back in action for about a day until Laney got pink eye. She got to stay home with Baba for one day and then looked well enough to go back to school. One of my patients claims that it hasn’t been cold enough to kill all the viruses going around – and I’m thinking they might be right. Here’s hoping for a healthier March!

Here is my old friend Slava Menn (currently the principal at Labrador Real Estate) doing a Tim Tam Slam.

Tracy and I learned how to do these in Australia. You use a Tim Tam (a triple chocolate cookie) as a straw to suck up hot chocolate, then pound it before it disintegrates.

Kaya has been doing a lot of “dress up” lately. Mommy was her latest victim.

Tommy and I have a record of imperfect Valentine’s Days. No matter how hard we try, something always happens. There was the year we met each other in Asheville during college only for me to get the flu and be unable to leave the bed in our hotel all weekend. Or the year where Tommy got food poisoning in Nashville. I’ve had to work overnight in the hospital several Valentine’s Days and we’ve been otherwise apart countless times for one reason or another. This year, however, we had a whole hour in the morning before work/school to celebrate with chocolate and presents. And then, you know, Tommy flew to Boston for two days and Kaya spent the evening with intractable vomiting. But the morning was great.

This is a picture of Kaya asleep (actually asleep) at the kitchen table with the vomit bucket I borrowed from the hospital during my first trimester. (She was at the table because although she didn’t eat dinner, she didn’t want to be alone so she came to the table to watch Laney and I eat). Poor Kaya!

The city water was accidentally contaminated, so the city ordered us to stop using it. Overnight, hundreds of thousands of water bottles was trucked in. Very impressive.
We used these gallons for everything:

I learned this trick in Boy Scouts. Heat a bowl of warm water and you can do all of your dishes with almost no water at all. I use gloves so I can do more scrubbing instead of using more soap.

I learned this trick from a crazy survivalist website. At first sign of water problems, fill your tub. There might be uncontaminated water still in the pipes that you can use and you never know when the situation will get suddenly much worse. Having an extra 50 gallons around could keep your family alive for weeks. We ended up using this to flush toilets because the safety was questionable.

Kaya’s ice cream flavor is called “superman”. If you’d like to know the exciting conclusion to this story, you’ll need to imagine multi-colored poops.