Weekend: Brahms, flowers, a little nostalgia

During the spring of my senior year, my college choir performed Brahms’ Requiem. Having missed the group’s performance of Bach’s B-Minor mass the year before (I had to leave two weeks before the show to start my study abroad semester in Australia) I threw myself into learning all the notes. I was not going to get lost on any of the fugues! I am happy to report that I didn’t. And apparently I drilled everything into my brain so well that when my church choir performed the Requiem this weekend, some 23 years later, it was pretty much all still stuck there. [Side note: Apparently I also sang this piece in 2011 too…I learned that via the widget that populates old blog posts at the bottom of new ones!] Complete with lots of spring-of-senior-year memories along for the ride.

Wow, that was a long time ago. I remember those last few weeks of school, the warming weather and flowers blooming, and then packing up my stuff and moving to a house I was sharing with a few girls in Washington DC, and starting my internship at USA Today…

This past weekend was a pretty full weekend in general. I actually visited Princeton on Friday morning (thus upping this weekend’s nostalgia factor considerably), and spent a few hours going to various sessions for an alumni conference. I made a quick visit to my parents’ house, then drove back home and got ready for…the preschool auction.

My husband and I went to our first auction for our kids’ preschool in 2012. It is now 2024. We have at least one more to go! That’s what 5 kids will do to you…I wound up winning a ride for my kid to school in a police car, so that is kind of exciting…

On Saturday morning, the 16-year-old and I went to a Requiem rehearsal. I really do love Brahms (my kid, alas, really didn’t…) but this rehearsal was fairly exhausting as it’s exhausting music. Lots of high notes and long phrases. The Requiem when performed is just about an hour, but the rehearsal was 2.5 hours!

Anyway, I relaxed to recover for a bit, and then my husband and I went to Longwood Gardens together. Yep, another botanical garden! The grounds were beautiful — not just the planted rows of tulips, but even the woods, full of white and purple flowers (see the picture accompanying this post). I have been watching the progression of flowering trees this spring, and right now it’s all dogwoods and redbuds (and crabapples! Not a glamorous tree, but it does make lots of marginal spaces look pretty white and fluffy right now…). Unfortunately it was kind of rainy the whole time, but that was OK as we didn’t have that much time before we needed to be home to pick up one kid and to get the 4-year-old back from the babysitter.

[Not fun entry: I spent several hours on Saturday night filling out camp forms of various varieties. My five kids are all going to different camps/summer academic programs, including three overnight ones, and several of them require extensive paperwork…This is an area where I really need to work on my outsourcing game. I can certainly sign things but there’s no reason I need to be making copies of my health insurance card in various formats or putting in the same emergency contact numbers in four different places…something to ponder.]

Everyone went to bed more or less on time on Saturday night because several of us had to be up in the wee hours. The 14-year-old needed to be at the airport at 4:30 a.m. to fly with his team to Dallas for the VEX World robotics championship. My husband was going to drive, so theoretically I didn’t need to get up, but I thought it might be wise to set my alarm for 3:40 just in case. Sure enough, my 14-year-old had gone back to sleep after setting his alarm, so it was good I checked. I tried to go back to sleep but unfortunately as soon as they walked out the door at 4 a.m. the 4-year-old was in my room. He did not go back to sleep for more than an hour. So…not the world’s best night.

The Brahms performance went well, though, and the robotics team won their first match. So now I am typing a draft of this at the 9-year-old’s parkour class, hoping I can go to bed soon after I get home. I am tired!

Monday follow up note: I went to bed on time, but then the 4-year-old woke up at 5 a.m. and wanted me in his room to get back to sleep, and he went down quickly, but that kind of killed the rest of my night….sigh.