Bring it on, May

We got buckets of rain this weekend. The upside is that everything is just so green compared to a mere 6 weeks ago.

I generally like May. I know people like to complain about end-of-school year stuff, but with five kids, even a random week in January can mysteriously have a lot going on. I say bring it on May. There are lots of cool things happening in the next 31 days.

This last weekend of April brought its own adventures. My husband and I attended the preschool’s annual silent auction + gala on Friday and I am thrilled to say that we won naming rights (for a year, I think) for the new nature trail they’re putting in. So we’ll see what the 3-year-old wants to call it! (I’d suggest naming it after himself but we shall see…)

In the inadvertent adventure category, as we were driving down our road to the auction, we looked out the window and whoa, something looked different. Sure enough, the storm had knocked out one of our giant hemlock trees. Fortunately it didn’t hit anything — it went into the yard, not into the road, and it was far enough from all buildings that it just hit the grass. That’s about as lucky as you can get with a tree of that size falling! I’d always thought it had looked like it was leaning a bit far over, but it had been stable at that angle for the 2.5 years we’d owned the house, and our tree care company (which has recommended trimming many other things for safety) didn’t say anything. Still, I generally tried not to sit under it. I guess my intuition was right.

On Saturday I had the mini adventure of going to a plant sale at a nearby private botanical garden. This place was less than a mile from our old house, but generally isn’t open to the public, so I’d never been there. In the rain and fog the grounds were a strange mix of both wildness and cultivation. And they had a fire going, so it smelled like going to camp. It was fun to look around.

On Saturday I also took the 13-year-old to an awards luncheon for the Philadelphia Classical Society. He’s been studying Latin, and won an award for 3-D printing an ancient Roman structure. There were something like 400 people there and he was the first kid called, so he had to go up and say his school and teacher into the microphone before anyone else had blazed that path, but he did it.

Sunday morning was one of those advanced logistical times we seem to have around here. It wasn’t raining at 7:30 a.m. (though boy did it start after…) so my husband decided to go for it with the Broad Street 10-miler. He took off and the 3-year-old immediately woke up, which made my getting ready for church take significantly longer. I left with him and the 11-year-old at 8:45, waking the three other boys up on the way out the door. My parents stopped by at 9:30 to get the other three kids (they only have three extra seats in the car, so that’s why I needed two kids to come with me…). The 13-year-old was charged with locking up, and he did that satisfactorily, which turned out not to be a great thing since my husband had not taken his key with him, so when he got back, very wet, after running 10 miles, he was locked out, but we made it home within about 10 minutes of when we got that call.

Anyway, the church service was great! We sang Carol Barnett’s “The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass” with Monroe Crossing playing. A banjo, bass, fiddle, and guitar will perk any worship service up. It was a lot of fun to perform this work, and then we sang I’ll Fly Away with the bluegrass band just for fun at the end. We had a lot of people clapping and stomping, which is pretty good for a Presbyterian church.

My parents came over for a while after and in the evening we had a sitter so my husband and I took our two older boys to Founding Farmers. They have grown into reasonable companions for the evening and I’m trying to make sure we don’t *not* do things with them because it’s kind of a pain to do them with little kids.

We came home to find that the 11-year-old had made our 2022 photo book! I had agreed to hire her to do this, and as a result, we now have that one done and she is starting on the 2021 book (she did 2020 a few months ago). This is truly a great solution, because it was never going to happen otherwise.

This morning, alas, didn’t go as planned…nanny is sick, and we were going to use my husband’s back-up care benefit, and the app said it was booked but then they sent an email at 6 a.m. that they couldn’t accommodate the 3-year-old, which my husband didn’t see until after they’d already driven there… So we shall see how today goes!