This has been quite the day and week! Up until last Wednesday, we still had Kirsti, Ryan, Alice, and Ivan here. They left very early Wednesday morning and our week since then has been SO different! Quiet. Busy in a different way.....
But, I need to tell about last Sunday. Emily was still on her choir trip to Chicago and Noah had TWO choir concerts that afternoon/evening. His first was with the Sheldon All Star Chorus at a venue in the city. Joe brought him there as well as the other three kids. Steve, Beckie, Micah, and I also attended. (Micah was in town to help at Little Fox while Craig and Mowgli - the owners - were on R&R. Yes, Mowgli is the woman's name. What were her parents thinking?!?!) The concert was excellent! They performed what they will be singing in New York in June at Carnegie Hall. The choir is mostly African-American and there are only about twenty in the group. All have amazing voices and they sang the Gospel Mass by Robert Ray. Afterwards, Joe took the younger three back home and Steve and I shuttled Noah to a north Saint Louis LDS stake center for his next performance with the Rising Generation Choir. This is an all-white group of kids, I think all are LDS, and they also gave a great concert. Noah had a delightful solo - such a super voice. The main problem with this concert was that there was no printed program to identify the musicians and, more importantly, to identify the musical numbers so we would know when it was over. I think most of the audience thought it would be an hour-long program so, when a particularly rousing and emotional song was sung sixty minutes after the start, everyone gave them a standing ovation thinking it was the grand finale. Only, it wasn't. They sang two songs beyond that and the concert didn't end for another fifteen minutes. Very anticlimactic. Here are photos from the second, too-long concert...
Monday evening, we had a family get-together in our backyard with Kirsti, Ryan, Alice, Ivan, Beckie, Emily, Joe, Noah, Lucy, Quinn, and Larkin. We had a bonfire to roast hotdogs or make campfire grilled cheese sandwiches and s'mores. There was a nice breeze to mitigate the humidity and we had a great time visiting with each other. Larkin and Alice played and played - especially with the puddles on the driveway making "soup" 😄
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It was sad to see them leave on Wednesday. It was so great to have them here...
After the Merrills left - we had to leave for the airport by 4:30 am but didn't actually get away until 4:50 causing Ryan and Kirsti and kids to dash through the airport a la Home Alone - Steve and I got back home and went back to bed! And then we spent the rest of the day returning the house to its pre-grandkid state and the rest of the week doing tons of laundry. Wednesday evening, I drove to Ballwin to see Lucy's orchestra concert...that is her with the long blond hair and glasses facing sideways.
Thursday Steve and I both had doctor appointments - follow-up for Steve and yearly check-up for me. Boy, trying to write down all the many little things we do every week is exhausting! Getting key copies to the back gate padlock made at Menards, shopping with a coupon at Bath and Body Works, attending the temple on Saturday morning, teaching lessons, cleaning up two weeks worth of emails in two email accounts.....Steve and I finished the last three episodes of season three of Manifest and, for Steve, he was annoyed at how it ended. And a final season begins in June. Steve is trying to decide whether to watch it. I will - I need the closure - but the story line is really getting ridiculous! I finished a really good book on Friday - Tress of the Emerald Sea. It was a delight to read. I got to babysit Saturday night for a family of three boys, Jaxson (9), Troy (5), and Quinten (3). I guess their parents were unable to get any of their regular babysitters and, because I am Jaxson's primary teacher, they asked me. Happily, by the time I arrived they had been bathed and fed so all I had to do was watch a few episodes of the animated version of How To Train Your Dragon before putting them to bed. Then, I got to watch Enola Holmes until the parents got home. Pretty easy gig.
For Mother's Day, I really wanted to have gluten-free pancakes from IHOP so we went out to eat late Saturday afternoon and I had a delicious meal. I also made my own homemade gluten-free pancakes Sunday morning. Mmmmmm. Steve and I are going to give each other (for Mother's day and Father's day) better quality outdoor string lights for the deck and the kids have pooled together money for me to replace the dogwood tree that I planted last year and that died sometime in the winter. Beckie came over for dinner Sunday evening and Steve, my hero, cooked pork steaks in torrential rain.
We are getting some good rains and my garden is thriving and I will close with photos....
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