A Late Tuesday Ten: What's Up?

Ten Things Keeping Me Busy, or An Update of Sorts

1. Planning a choir trip.
I'm planning a three-day trip for lovely lady's choir. Phone calls, emails, faxes, meetings. Details. Shopping. Fielding phone calls from parents worried about everything from their trip account balance to the swine flu. I can't wait to go on the trip, and I can't wait until it's over.

2. Choir.
Spring choir started, upping the number of choristers in my family (and thus the number of separate rehearsals for the Mom Taxi) to four. The Spring Concert took up an entire day with rehearsals and performances. Now the concert is over, the spring choir is over, and the season is winding down.

3. Karate.
We signed up for a family karate class. The boys and loving husband and I attend together. it's a blast, and well worth the time spent, but it takes up two mornings a week, time we really don't have to spare.

4. Swim lessons.
Fine Young Gent the Eldest has been taking swim lessons all year, with the goal of joining the swim team. Fortunately for our schedule, he loves swimming but is re-thinking the swim team idea because he also loves karate. But I bit the bullet and signed up his younger brothers for swim lessons this session. My thinking: I've got to be at the pool anyway, and if I take them now, no summer swim lessons. So I sit on my rear end on those ridged metal bleachers for 30 minutes, twice a week, reading a book. They learn to swim, I get to read. Win-win.

5. Reading.
I manage to fit it into the cracks of my life, and I still read during the boys' Quiet Time. Right now I'm reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver), still working on Green Housekeeping (Ellen Steinbeck) and The Art of the Commonplace (Wendell Berry), just finished Free Range Kids (Lenore Skenazy) and The Backyard Homestead (Carleen Madigan, ed.)

6. Laundry.

7. School.
Math, language, science, the works. We're studying astronomy this term. For a while we had a balloon solar system on the boys' ceiling. Second-grade gent is working on writing a novel using the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program. Sounds a little ambitious, but he's having a blast. It sounds so...pretentious. "Yeah, my second grader is trying to write his first novel. What's yours up to?" Really, he's just having fun filling out the pages and using his creative brain to write a story just like every other normal second-grade kid. Kindergarten gent has been grousing about doing school work even though it takes him only 20-30 minutes, plus our science readings and fun activities. I told him "Suck it up buttercup."

8. Play.
Still making sure that despite my busy schedule the boys get plenty of time for the "work" of childhood: Play. Especially as spring rolls out the sunshine and flowers.

8 1/2. Thinking about the garden and getting outside while the boys play.
It's been pouring rain. They go play in it. I look out and think, "Gee, I wish I enjoyed gardening in the rain."

9. Watching American Idol.

10. Not writing on my blog.
Too busy. When things settle down there'll be more pictures, more projects, more out-of-doors.