Well, we've made through another round of holiday events. Our Easter started with the Mustang event three weekends ago. They decided to have it at the zoo this year, which was a little different. Besides the requisite egg hunt and face painting, and eating cookies and lemon bars, there wasn't a lot to do. My brother's kids missed the egg hunt because they did it early, and Jamie is too old, so Ren was nice and shared some of her loot with everybody since she was the only person who actually got to participate. Honestly, I was a little underwhelmed but it did give us a chance to go to the zoo, which was fun, and we didn't have to buy water while we were there since we could raid the refreshments. This was the first trip to the zoo for Ren (and Asher, obviously) and the first time Jamie has been since before he was in school; there was some debate about whether it was my first time or not, seeing as I grew up here until I was seven, but we settled on agreeing that it was the first that I have been time in my adult life.
The weekend before last was our trip to Dallas for LTC* with our church group. That was.....interesting with a newborn; Asher did pretty well, but he didn't seem to care for the general chaos. His feeding routine got completely thrown off and he didn't care for sleeping in the hotel room, so nobody got much sleep all weekend. Getting there and back was also interesting. It took about eight hours going due to two or three stops to feed Asher (one complete with dead battery that a lovely Buc-ee's employee was nice enough to help us get started again) and one stop for lunch. The return trip was better, it only took us six hours, stopping once to feed the baby and once to feed everybody. All in all everything went pretty well for a trip with a one-month-old. Denine commented on the way home that she was glad we went last year or this year probably would have been horrible. The way our church does LTC is to get a suite at the hotel we stay at and provide meals so that everyone doesn't have to spend a fortune eating fast food all weekend. Imagine a group of about 300 people, over half of which are kids between the ages of nine and eighteen, trying to cram into a single hotel suite to get food. On top of that is the event itself, which involves spending a day-and-a-half wandering around an over-capacity hotel trying to make it to last minute practices and event times. While it was second nature to me after spending years doing similar events for band in high school, Denine wasn't used to that and found it more than a little stressful. This year, however, she knew what to expect, albeit with adding an infant to the mix. It also helped that we've gotten to know one of the other couples from our life group that also has kids that age pretty well over the last year, so we pretty much just let her figure out when who needed to be where and followed them around all weekend (love ya, Susan! >>"^,,^"<< ).
Event-wise, Jamie got three gold team medals (drama, chorus, and Bible Bowl) and an individual bronze in Bible Bowl this year, which is pretty awesome. Next year BB will be over all of Genesis, so hopefully we'll get started a little bit earlier. We started Revelation in January this year and barely made it through before Easter; Genesis is over twice as long, and Easter is two weeks earlier next year. On the up side, most of the kids know most of Genesis anyway so it should be more like an in-depth review, as opposed to Revelation, which most of them had never read before.
The only other noteworthy happening has been Jamie gearing up for band next school year. We had our first meeting for band last Monday, which was just to go over again what instrument choices they have and sign up for interviews to select an instrument. Jamie's decided that he wants to play clarinet, which is nice because he can use Denine's old one (which she was getting quite emotional about when we pulled it out of the closet the other day), and the band director and already told him that shouldn't be a problem, so hopefully his interview is just a formality. I keep trying to get him to go for oboe or bassoon, but he apparently really likes the clarinet; percussion, unfortunately, seems to rank above brass but below woodwinds. Oh well, there's still two more (and a theoretical third) that might be drummers when they grow up, so all hope is not lost; in the words of Yoda, "there is another." I guess maybe we should start looking into band boosters now.
Anywho, we've spent the week trying rather unsuccessfully to catch up on rest, but this weekend should be blissfully uneventful. Hopefully we can get everybody back in a routine and attain some semblance of normalcy. At least until the kids get out of school in about a month and everything gets shot again. I keep forgetting and then being reminded that I'll have a junior high student at the end of the summer.
*shudder*
P.S. This was originally written last week but I haven't gotten around to actually posting it until now. Something to do with not with not having much computer time between helping wrangle three kids and being exhausted from lack of sleep. Mea Culpa (I seem to be having a lot of these lately...).
* For those of you who read this and don't already know, LTC (properly LTNTC, or North Texas Leadership Training for Christ) is a Church of Christ youth conference held in Dallas every year where students in 3rd through 12th grade compete in events designed to encourage active leadership such as drama, chorus, song leading, scripture reading, poetry, visual art, Bible Bowl and Bible Quiz. It's a pretty big event for a lot of congregations; students spend sometimes several months preparing for events. It is always held on Easter weekend, which seems counter-intuitive for a church event, but it allows them to have events on Friday evening with people coming from out of town, and they also know they can get a hotel or convention center that weekend (it's always held at the Hilton Anatole now, but I remember it being at the Dallas Convention Center when I was in high school). You can check out the website here (http://www.ntltc.org/).
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