We are back to having all seven of us under one roof again! (Albeit briefly.) On Saturday, my oldest took his last final and finished his freshman year at Northeastern. My husband picked him up shortly thereafter and they drove all the way back home, arriving shortly after midnight. He is off to a summer program in the UK in about 10 days so this is a brief interlude, though he’ll be back in July/August.
He’s had such a good first year — getting fantastic grades in hard classes (organic chemistry) and doing stuff like volunteering at a homeless shelter assisting with a medical program on weekends. I’m so proud of him. The first part of high school was not easy as he figured out how to study but I’m so happy to see all that hard work paying off.
I wound up staying up to see them get back at midnight because I’d been driving the 16-year-old home from the cast party for the high school musical shortly before that. He’s been doing tech for all the shows. We just found out he qualified for the national Technology Student Association competition in June. And the 14-year-old had a great jazz band performance Friday night, including a solo. So lots to celebrate.
Some other weekend highlights included going for a run with my friend Jane along the river on Saturday morning. We timed this perfectly to finish right before it started pouring raining. We had some playdates on Saturday and then in the evening I had a sitter come for a few hours (one my 6-year-old gets so excited to see) and I went to the gym and then went to Barnes & Noble to plan out my summer. I made a Summer Fun List and then looked at the calendar and the various things we have going on to figure out when they could happen. In some cases I made bookings and in other cases I just set target dates (I’m guessing we can probably get Phillies tickets a little closer to the game so I chose a weekend and we can see about the weather and such). I also briefly looked at some upcoming highlights for the rest of the year. Maybe planning doesn’t sound like everyone’s idea of a fun Saturday night but this was all planning stuff I want to do. Which I think deserves to be planned as much as stuff we have to do.
Sunday, in my eternal game of schedule Tetris, I had set things up so I could be the lone driver. Basically this involved switching the order of the two middle schoolers at tennis lessons so that I could drive the 6-year-old somewhere during the older kid’s lesson, with the assumption that she could check herself out and hangout near the tennis place on her own for 20 minutes after (something I would not have the 11-year-old do…for various reasons). I had thought my husband and the oldest would come home on Sunday, but since they made it home Saturday night I had the second driver (in fact, I had a third) and didn’t need to worry about all this. After the driving we had a relaxed afternoon (I did some Legos with the 6-year-old, laundry, and read a book…) and then we had family dinner with all 7, which was both nice and chaotic. So it goes. I then signed 125 book plates for a book giveaway.
Yep, Big Time is out in just a few days. May 5 — though when I went to go plan in Barnes & Noble’s cafe on Saturday night…there the book was. A little early, but hey! You can also pre-order through Amazon, Bookshop, Hudson, Books-a-million or through your local independent book store. You can also ask your library to order a copy. If multiple patrons request a book, sometimes this influences how many copies a library system purchases — I appreciate the support.
In the meantime, here’s a sonnet I wrote about lilacs. (Yep, my sonnet-writing project is still on.)
I know the scent, these lilacs on the air.
It catches you off guard, so sweet, sublime —
this purple cone of flowers glowing there
on branches that aren’t much, much of the time,
just kept around for April when the sun,
first gentle, then more earnest, coaxes through
the buds. Before I know it, it’s begun —
one morning, down the driveway, something new.
I write most days, it’s always something else
a few more lines, forgettable, it seems,
until, just like the lilac’s sudden smells
there’s something in these steady rhyming schemes
that wasn’t there before — some magic spot
that keeps me writing, chasing that one thought.
Very nice sonnet, combining the emergence of lilacs and strings of poetry.
@Marthe – Thanks, so glad you like it!