fun in threes, sometimes fours
the girl
Ms. R was the children's choir director for our parish for a long time. Most of L's time in the choir was under her direction, and like all the other (mostly) girls, she loved Ms. R. When she had her third child, she decided it was time to call it quits.
Shortly after that, L decided to call it quits with the choir.
Now Ms. R is back to help the girls prepare some Christmas music. This evening, they were hired to give a concert in a swanky downtown hotel...
K and I decided we were going to forego the usual outside decorations this year and try something new. With two trees in the front yard, there seemed to be only one thing to do: transform them into Christmas trees.
"It should be faster than putting up the icicle lighting," K said.
"Should be," I agreed.
So while K was running her first open house as a real estate agent, the kids and I set about wrapping some 344 feet of lights (8 lines of 43 feet each) around our crape myrtles.
I wasn't sure how it would turn out because of the random places we had to string a line from one branch to another, creating a strange horizontal bit in an otherwise verticle orientation.
In the end, I think it turned out fairly well.
"How long did it take?" asked K earlier this evening.
"About as long as the icicle lighting."
Maybe next year we'll do both...or neither.
I swear, it looked better on the phone…
The Girl joined her first club volleyball team this week. She’s with nine other girls on a team for girls aged 14 and under. There’s also a team for 13 and under. Why the 14s? I like to think it was because of some skills the coaches saw.
It’s quite a commitment for us, though. We’ll be traveling to tournaments throughout the southeast. This means the price of the season of club play (a four-figure number) gets additional augmentation with travel costs.
I bring this up not to complain but to compare it to other countries, where such clubs are subsidized through tax funding. The cost of travel might still be there, but there’s not that initial, up-front cost. “Well, you pay for it with taxes,” someone might counter. True, but I think the development of a country’s youth is a far better way to spend tax money than some of the ways we spend our tax money.
L baked cupcakes for the party we'll be going to tomorrow evening.
The Boy and I made the jack-o-lantern.
Then the kids played Go Fish, even during a bathroom break...
Today was a teacher workday, one of three that we are able to take off without worry. Exchange days, they're called. If we've gone to meetings and such after school, we use those hours toward the time we would have ordinarily spent in school. I didn't have those hours, so I took a personal day.
E and I spent the morning working on the large tree that had fallen in the drainage ditch -- which we call a creek -- that runs behind our house. I knew that if we didn't, the first big rain storm would cause flooding.
I didn't realize how much of the tree was under brush and vines that I'm assuming it took down with itself as it fell. We cleared all that away so we could get to the tree, and we cut and removed as much as we could with just two of us.
E is of an age that he actually is starting to be helpful. I can pull on a large tangle of vines and have him cut the critical vines that are keeping everything locked and immobile. He can bring tools to me, help pull things up out of creekbeds, offer helpful commentary on the whole process.
Once we got that done and ate some lunch, we spent the afternoon at Denver Downs -- fun with hay, ropes, and corn...
