August weekend highs and lows

The house is feeling slightly emptier right now. The 10-year-old has been off at camp for a week, and the 13-year-old just left yesterday. I am sure they are both having a great time. The 10-year-old will be required to write at least one letter, so I’m hoping that shows up pretty soon. In the meantime, I’ve been mailing him various things, including (requested) pictures with his stuffed animals.

On Friday I went to my oldest’s vocal recital. He did a “vocal boot camp” this week with his voice teacher and everyone performed a solo number at the end of the week show, plus some ensemble pieces. He sang the song “Larger than Life” from the show My Favorite Year, and was in a trio singing “Old Friends” from Merrily We Roll Along. He had been practicing these numbers at home all week, with the net result that the 5-year-old has been singing them constantly. He did a pretty good job on picking up on the lyrics and melody! (And the 18-year-old did a good job performing!)

Then, Friday evening, my husband, 15-year-old, and the 5-year-old went to an evening Phillies game. This mostly went well, though I was fussing over the 5-year-old when the biggest play of the evening happened — the call of whether a runner was safe or not that was overturned, thus giving the Phillies the lead. The evening weather was lovely (cool! I wore a fleece!) and the Phillies won, so that was nice. But then we sat in the parking lot for about 45 minutes trying to get out, which was less cool, since the 5-year-old was getting pretty tired.

He slept in a bit the next morning, and I roused the same crew to go to this farm’s advertised Peach Fest about an hour away. It sounded good in theory — pick-your-own peaches, live music, food trucks, etc. But we got there and the lines were too long to make anything doable. You had to go on a hayride to the actual peach picking area, and they were only sending a wagon every 10 minutes or so, so the line was stretching out and we waited in it for about 15 minutes as the 5-year-old was just melting down. I mean screaming that he never wanted to come, running away, hitting us, etc. I eventually got him in my arms where he was calming down a bit but it was kind of upsetting. I also realized that we would likely have at least a 30 minute wait for the tractor on the other end of the peach picking too. I decided we were leaving, but then this brought out the side of my husband’s personalty that we should stay at everything until the bitter end, so as I was driving home he was saying that we shouldn’t have left. Now I’m not saying this is related, but the 5-year-old, about 20 minutes into the drive, started saying that he wanted to go back, and then screaming about that. So I was really thrilled with everyone.

Anyway…everyone managed to calm down eventually. And the weekend had other good spots. I sat on the hammock reading for about an hour while my husband took the little guy to get his hair cut and to the grocery store. My husband and the 18-year-old went shopping for all his dorm room stuff, and seem to have gotten almost everything on the list. I took the 15-year-old out for a trail run to practice for cross country. It was warm, but pretty. I managed to play the piano for about 45 minutes, and I sang in the summer choir on Sunday morning. The 5-year-old went to church with me and is excited because he is now old enough to start in the church service before going to his Sunday School class in the middle. He told me he was going to be “super good” and he really was. There is a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde element to small children!