So here’s the thing: it was choir concert weekend.  You’d think I’d have learned to schedule my posts when these kinds of things are coming, but alas…  There was a choir rehearsal for Girly Saturday morning for 2 hours, then we had an hour off before BigGuy’s rehearsal (which included eating lunch with the choir).  Sunday we had soccer at 9:30am, call time for the first concert at 1:30pm, finished that and got home by 3:30pm and then had to get BigGuy dressed, fed, and to his 5:30pm call time for his concert.

We did, however, manage to keep up with our seasonal activities… 

Day 12: Decorate the house.  We did this.  The kids and Papa bought the tree Friday night so that it had time to drink up and rest for decorating between concerts on Sunday.  That’s when most of the decorating got done, too.

Day 13: Feast of St. Lucia.  This was totally blindsided by the concerts and the best we did to honor it was that the kids participated in an amazing candlelight performance in each of their concerts.  Their choir organization has many choirs and therefore does three concerts where there is some overlap in music.  This year, each performance ended with the audience joining in “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!” and then a dark, candlelight performance of “Let There Be Peace on Earth”.  Wikipedia describes this as:  commemorating Saint Lucy, a martyr under the Diocletianic Persecution, who according to legend brought “food and aid to Christians hiding in the catacombs” using a candle-lit wreath to “light her way and leave her hands free to carry as much food as possible”. Her feast once coincided with the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year before calendar reforms, so her feast day has become a festival of light.

Today is Day 14 and the activity was to watch or listen to “The Nutcracker”.  So guess what’s playing now?  Thaaaaaat’s right.  The interpretive dance has been interesting.

The next two weeks get crazy so bear with me.  Today BigGuy did the first half of the Stanford10 achievement tests online through Seton Testing.  I just had to be in the room and make sure he wasn’t looking things up online (although I’m not sure he could have possibly done that using the browser they had us install).  Their testing application had a calculator available if/when he needed it so I didn’t provide him one and therefore didn’t have to worry about him using it a the wrong time.  We have the second half tomorrow and hopefully will have the results by Friday.  We were going to have this administered by a local proctor but then I saw that it was available online if I proctored it.  I’m not sure if a parent-proctored online test would be admissible for entry into anything but we’re going to find out when he tries to take lab science next year.  If you’re interested, here’s a decent review comparing three of the more popular standardized tests.

In the meantime, we will buckle down and prepare for a busy couple of weeks ahead!