ok, so mm is up and sipping hazelnut coffee, despite the 2:45 am bedtime..........the past 24 hours have been more than a blur........my mother and i arrived at the cincy/northky airport in time to meet jon, the belgian boy at the delta luggage claim. we had his picture, and thought it would be no problem to pick him out of the crowd...........he has lost weight since that picture was taken....or rather...he appears to have lost muscle since he is not in gymnastics season.......anyway, the realtime jon looked much smaller than i expected.......he whipped out his english phrase book within 5 minutes of meeting me....i must remember to speak more slowly and to use fewer slang terms.......anyway...with 5 hours to kill, we got back in the car and headed toward mecca......the joseph-beth store in norwood (less than 1 mile from where ecw grew up, and our first apartment).....we had dinner in the cafe before browsing.....and emerged from our meal to find that it was a booksigning evening.......david eggers who wrote the book' you(they?) will know us by our velocity' he sounded quite interesting.....he was reading aloud from one of his books........but they must have stockpiled all of his books near the signing table as i could not find any away from the crowd.......we made out way through tjmaxx, steinmart, homegoods, and other stores until they closed at 9:00, then went back to the airport, where we sat and watched cnn until scw emerged, looking taller, more european, and much older than when he left.........we could not leave just then, as a girl from lexington who had been on most of scw's flights appeared to have been forgotten......her parents had not shown up.......we waited with her, then started asking for them to be paged, then finally sent her and scw off to search other terminals (they arrived on united...) in case the parents thought she was on delta........bingo, her mother had been in another terminal, waiting and worrying.......we finally left for home at midnight.......there is something surreal about driving late at night, with all of the truckers.........trying to stay awake......we listened first to allison kraus, then to wilco's newest album........several tracks reminded me of dark side of the moon, especially against a night sky and a van full of sleepy passengers.......we will surely here snips and snatches of the belgian experience over the coming days and months.......though there is less to tell given the day-by-day commentary we were blessed to read thanks to blogging......less to explain.........i feel much more prepared to be a host given all that i have read about the gillard family and how they dealt with a 4-week houseguest.......still, it will be a challenge.........and then there is my baby boy...back home again......praises be....