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Saturday, June 6, 2015

June 6, 2015

What a beautiful day. I'm doing better today. J let me sleep in and then I stayed in my room until a neighbor rang the bell at 11:30 to let me know he saw a large, healthy, unafraid, coyote trotting down our street and I should keep the kids inside.  Love that our neighbors watch out for each other!

It was a good Saturday.  I keep typing and deleting this paragraph because 1) I don't want to sound like the lazy lump I am and 2) I don't want to let anyone know that I probably overdid it today.  Pretty sure I shouldn't have vacuumed or carried patio furniture around the yard or cleaned the kitchen or carried laundry baskets around the house. 

Onwards!  Pretty pictures!  



Life is beautiful.




Friday, June 5, 2015

June 5, 2015

Hot summer day!

We spent the morning at a park in the neighborhood, and the girls biked to a newly re-opened neighborhood park in the afternoon.  It was a really nice day to be at the park.. We saw a few friends and the kids got to play with neighborhood friends.

We've been slowly amassing a flotilla of patio furniture.  Today I sold one of the larger sets so we can rearrange the others and be able to walk through our patios and decks without needing to play "the floor is lava."  (Although that game is fun.)

I feel like an idiot today.  I am in my brace and my thumb tendon aches.  I am using text to type to blog tonight.  It's driving me mad: I WANT to be superwoman darn it.  I've been defeated by a pile of laundry and an iPhone.  My ego is my kryptonite.  I wanted to help J with his chores- folding is one of the few things I still can't do, but he was working so hard on other projects.  I want to keep this blog going so family knows what we're up to.  I wanted to play in the recital last night so that the kids could sound their best with the duets, and I could demonstrate some of the more interesting parts of musical history.  Every parent expressed their delight and how lush the songs sounded or how the recital was structured and how much they learned.  If it hadn't been for the other things I've done the recital wouldn't have been a problem for me.

I had my piano lesson tonight we spent a very nice half hour working on the left hand of Beethoven's third sonata.


Thursday, June 4, 2015

June 4, 2015

Recital day!  Recital day!  La La La La.....how many recitals have I hosted now?  Well, two a year for the past 8 years?  You would think I would learn to simmer down.  I'm getting better though.  Really.

I spent the day alternately scrubbing things that no one would see and throwing myself on the couch to complain about my stress headache.  Oh Myrnie.  You're so...Myrnie.  Aunt LoLo happened to be going to Costco right when I called her in a crisis to ask if I should get cake or cookies.  We decided on cookies (good choice) and she grabbed them for me.  Yay sisters!!

I taught piano in the afternoon, and made another good dinner: I am on a roll.  J fried pork chops on the stove while I made sauteed mushrooms, one-pot linguine, and a salad.  Nom nom.  I could get used to have a partner in the kitchen!  He's slowly learning where to find things like salt and pepper, it will only get easier.

We had a beautiful recital.  I was ready to just cancel the whole thing about a month ago, I just couldn't face another recital the same as the last 15.  BUT, I realized we had a good solid line up of old standards....we broke the recital into sections by musical era.  I introduced the eras, threw a few of my own pieces in to demonstrate a few key era-specific quirks, and we had a blast.  I played Bach's Invention No. 8 to show dual-voicing in the Baroque era, Schumann's Knecht Ruprecht to demonstrate the story-telling of the Romantic era, Aaron Copland's The Cat and the Mouse to demonstrate how the sound became the story in the modern era, and finally John Cage's 4'33 to show how the definition of music started to change.  All those pieces formed an effective bridge from Star Spangled Banner to the Beatles.

It was all very well received, and it gave a good frame work for the kids' pieces.  I played a LOT of duets tonight too, so even a piece as simple as repeated middle c's sounded lush.  The parents and grandparents enjoyed the new format, and the kids didn't seem nervous at all.  All very good stuff.  Everyone went outside for cookies and playing, and it was a great recital.  



Wednesday, June 3, 2015

June 3, 2014


The sun.  It comes up so early.  And when the sun is awake, that means my SON is awake, and he crawls into bed with me and I'm too groggy to do anything about it at 5:45 in the morning.  Ahem.

Wednesdays are early days- I set my alarm for 7 and try and make myself presentable for the first lesson of the day at 7:30.  Let me tell you, that lesson feels a LOT better in the sunshine than in the dark of winter!  

Students did great- everyone is ready for tomorrow's recital.  Not everyone was prepared to receive an end of year progress report.  I did not mince words, and I think the kids knew exactly what I was talking about and agreed with me.  They know when they are giving their best, they know what we are working on, and they know when they've been sliding by.  Love teaching those kids.

(*** Spoiler alert: I am no longer sick.  Hallelujah.)

Right after lessons, J remarked how great it would be if I could drive him to work and pick him up after the girls' dance classes.  WOOT- adventure day, everyone in the car!  We dropped him at work, deposited books at the library, and spent the better part of the day at a friend's house.  

Our kids are different in age (Our cumulative age is 20, theirs is 11 I think) but the kids are a good fit.  The two oldest are peas in a pod- it was pretty hilarious to hear them HOWLING with laughter at each other's jokes.  The nine times table- one number counts up and the other counts down!  Yeah, but look how you can do it on your fingers!  Oh the jokes.  They just rolled on and on.  

We left E there to play pirate fairy princess treasure hunt in the backyard (they drew maps but forgot to hide any treasure, so they were scouring the yard FOR HOURS.  Not sure if they found it.)  I brought my youngest two home- we stopped to pick up some fabulous shoes for me from a fellow Buy Nothing member, and then took some down time at home.  

(Saw this kitty in our yard hunting rabbits.  Sadly, I think it was unequal to the task.)



After an hour it was time to get BACK in the car, get E, and drop the girls off at dance.  Cocoa was so antsy we just turned around and chilled at home for an hour until it was time to go get the girls again.  We picked J up from work, looked at the traffic and the clock, and decided it was unreasonable to give ourselves two hours to fight traffic home, make and eat dinner, and get to within blocks of where we were sitting.  Conveyer belt sushi won (it always wins) and we gorged on pickled herring, cucumber rolls, pot stickers, salmon, and Krab salad.  

(I am back in my brace today.  I remembered why I stopped blogging regularly: thumb typing on my phone is a very, very, very bad idea.  I decided to be a super hero and folded about six loads of laundry two weeks ago, and it just started the slow slide down.  I've been good about resting and stretching, and now I am typing ON THE COMPUTER, like every good human should.  Why do we think opposable thumbs are invincible?  They're not.)



After dinner we headed to the park for E's final regular event with her Activity Days girls and leaders- they had a forest scavenger hunt, played games, and then roasted miniature marshmallows over tea lights and smeared them on honey grahams with chocolate chips.  Tres adorbs.

I love this man.  So much.  So, so much.  And....look at my face.  There IS a light at the end of the tunnel every  month!


Tuesday, June 2, 2015

June 2, 2015

The first day of really real summer break.  Lots more time for playing, fighting, and learning to make up.

I am going to apologize right now, because I am smack in the middle of what my doctor decided to describe as a "mood disorder" and I normally don't blog while sick, but I promised my wandering parents updates!

I lamented to J that I still, at age 34, do not know how to cook meat.  I wander the meat sections of the grocery store and stare at all the large pink packages, and turn around and go home with sausages because THOSE I know what to do with.  "So....just pick up a package and we'll figure out what to do with it!"

My Costco meat of the week was flank steak- I've eaten that before, I know what to do with it.  I stuck it in a ziploc with Yoshi sauce this morning and let it sit in the fridge all day.  (I picked up pork chops--I think-- at Fred Meyer.  I have to do something with those tomorrow- think of me.)

I spent my day getting the June sacrament meeting music in order, finalizing Thursday's recital program and program notes, and helping the girls clean their playroom.  I had to stop helping when I realized C was too quiet, and I found him watching Family Guy on my iPad.  He's now lost iPad privileges and I'm an idiot for leaving him alone with a device.  I know.  That is DEFINITELY not a kid show.

Let's see.  This picture, someone had told him no, he hadn't stopped, and then someone screamed at him.  And he probably stubbed his toe on his way to find me because dude is growing so fast he doesn't know where he ends and floor begins.  Poor guy picked up a splinter in his foot yesterday, I think from my dining room bench (!!), and it tore his little foot open.  It was a good half inch long and had an entry AND exit point.  He was brave and let me pull it out twice, once from each wound because it broke in the middle.  He spent half of yesterday crawling around pretending to be a dog, to avoid walking on that foot.



Dinner actually work tonight.  HALLELUJAH.  I thought I'd lost my ability to cook.  I gave up my accounting knowledge when E was born.  All sewing stopped when M came.  Then when C came, I've pretty much stopped baking and cooking it seems.  Definitely stopped baking.  I used to make bread every other day, and make cookies and cakes and scoff "OH, it's only three extra minutes to make it from scratch.  Why would I use a boxed mix?"  And then my butt got handed to me on a platter.




Mimi, while hiding from Cocoa this afternoon in the laundry room (which he then insisted was his something or other room and she screamed at him and he cried and I reminded her that is NOT how we make friends)......she saw peaches.  She came upstairs, during the piano lessons I was teaching, to inform me that I was going to serve peaches with dinner tonight.  Look at that plate.  Do you see peaches?  Neither did she.  She came in, saw the meal I'd spent an hour preparing, and with a quiver in her lip and a resigned sigh, quavered "Oh...I thought we were having peaches.  *sniff* It's OK.  We aren't having peaches.  I just...I just thought we were having peaches."

That's when I decided to give her another chance to enter the room, before I smote her with the fiery rod of my mouth.

I served peaches for dessert.

I didn't mention my cramps.  I have cramps.  I am using LAMAZE BREATHING to get through these cramps.  My children, seeing me hunched over the table with my eyes squeezed shut and doing LAMAZE BREATHING, said "Oh.  Mom, are you OK?...... Mom, when do you think you will go get that book you promised to find for me?"

Children are psychopaths.


And yes, when I was done I went and found the books.  After finishing a grade of school, they get to read the corresponding Harry Potter book over the summer.  My heart gave a little thrill when J started off "Chapter One.  The Boy Who Lived."

June 1, 2015

Where did the warm weather go?  Seattle proved it's "still got it" and gave us gloom and drizzle today.  After a warm and dry winter AND spring, I was glad to see some moisture!

C was in bed with me around 6:30 this morning.  We are waking up earlier and earlier, yawn.

The girls finished their tests this morning: we officially have a fifth and a second grader!  




We did grocery shopping before lunch- tonight was our night to prepare a meal for the ladies at the overnight shelter.   We brought them spiralized zucchini noodles with marinara and meatballs, country loaves, garlic butter, salad, and mini cinnamon rolls.  I served my family the same thing tonight- very yummy!

The girls helped me clean the kitchen tonight and we made super quick chocolate rolls (crescent dough with Nutella, rolled into a log, sliced, and baked at 375 for 12 minutes.). Very, VERY tasty. 




June 1, 2015

Where did the warm weather go?  Seattle proved it's "still got it" and gave us gloom and drizzle today.  After a warm and dry winter AND spring, I was glad to see some moisture!

C was in bed with me around 6:30 this morning.  We are waking up earlier and earlier, yawn.

The girls finished their tests this morning: we officially have a fifth and a second grader!  




We did grocery shopping before lunch- tonight was our night to prepare a meal for the ladies at the overnight shelter.   We brought them spiralized zucchini noodles with marinara and meatballs, country loaves, garlic butter, salad, and mini cinnamon rolls.  I served my family the same thing tonight- very yummy!

The girls helped me clean the kitchen tonight and we made super quick chocolate rolls (crescent dough with Nutella, rolled into a log, sliced, and baked at 375 for 12 minutes.). Very, VERY tasty.