Midwest Vacation: #6

On Sunday morning I had some nice quiet alone time and made sloppy joes for the family for when they got home from church. I was feeling rather clumsy and had a couple spills so I spent a bit of my time cleaning up too. Whoops!

After lunch John and the kids and I went into Grand Rapids to Heritage Hill and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Meyer May House. It was reconstructed about twenty years ago to its 1909 design. The house is owned by the Steelcase corporation who uses it for company events.



I was surprised how many people were there. There was already a group of people watching the film they show about the reconstruction when we arrived. So we sat in the conference room looking at binders of photos. Zander found this pop-up book that shows several Wright designs.



After touring the house, we drove around Heritage Hill a little bit. The next time Anne visits, she really must spend some time in this neighborhood. This was one of our favorites. Don't you love the keyhole window?

For supper, we cooked up a Chinese feast. Joanna and Zoe made homemade egg rolls. The kids and I used up the remaining wrappers for shrimp rolls. Joanna and I worked on some sesame chicken and she made some coconut shrimp. Everything was so tasty.

On Monday morning, I went with Joanna to Zoe and Zander's school to volunteer listening to the kids in Zoe's class read what they call their "baggie books." The books are just photocopies stapled together which the kid carries in their backpack in a gallon-sized ziptop bag. Every day, each kid reads a book to a volunteer parent (or other). So our job is to correct any mistakes the child makes and to pass them on to the next book in the list. If they make more than three mistakes, they have to keep working on that book. I only had one girl who was close to not passing but I thought she did a good enough job so I gave her the next book. What can I say? I'm a softie.

One girl had a book with the word "zyzomys" in it. Now who knows what those are? I sure didn't! We agreed to disagree on how to pronounce it and when she read that it meant "rock rat" she decided to read that out loud instead of zyzomys from then on. She was pretty funny. And I learned something at school that day.

That afternoon I discovered on their DVR a show called Planet Earth. Have you heard of it? It's amazing. I watched three and a half shows! The photography is amazing and one of the cool things about it is that with new technology they were able to capture footage of animals we don't normally get to see: snow leopards, wild baby giant pandas, for example. It's pretty amazing stuff. It's a Discovery Channel 11-part miniseries, so check it out.