A Long Fall Weekend

As I mentioned before, I took last Friday off to see Lucy's play. First though, Darren and I took Elaine to a make-up swim session. Instead of her usual teacher, she had a guy who looked more like a linebacker than a swim teacher. Elaine spent the first ten minutes of the lesson with her head under her wing, letting him know how much better she likes Ms. Nicole. He then convinced her that he is good friends with Ms. Nicole, so she unbent a little and had fun the rest of the lesson. On the way out she told us, "Mr. Ryan's my friend."

We made it over to the school in time to get last row seats (ka-razy, since we were 10 minutes early) to the play. Two of the kindergartners can already read quite well, so they were the narrators. The rest of the kids didn't have any lines; they basically just made their way across the stage and either barked, meowed, or, as in Lucy's case, fluttered. The little girl who was playing the lead role of the very lonely firefly cried through the whole thing. I don't think kindergarten is really up her alley. She cried and hung onto her dad's leg the first day. Since then, Mrs. Blevins has told me what a good friend Lucy has been to her, bringing her tissues and putting her arm around her, saying, "Don't worry, Lexi, I'll be your friend" when she cries. Which of course makes me really happy and proud of her.

Here they both are, with Lucy's friend Gabby on the left, who was one of the narrator/readers:



This shot just cracks me up. Yeah, not a lot of stage fright or anything for Lucy...


Posing after the play with her little sister...


After the play, Darren took us all out for a celebratory lunch to one of my favorite places. It's actually a cafe within a furniture store--they have fantastic food. The girls wanted to ride the glass elevator up to the other floors, so we did that and Darren tried out various leather recliners. Then we went home and I realized that I had forgotten to take Lucy to her mandatory eye appointment, which if she doesn't have done by October 15, she'll be asked to leave kindergarten. Nice one, Mom.

The next day, we headed to a nearby apple orchard with some friends from church. It was the perfect day for it, though almost just a little too warm. We ate hot dogs, drank apple cider, and had cider donuts. We rode on a wagon through the orchard, and when we got off Elaine said that she wanted to ride the ponies. It's surprising that she'll ever voice anything when she's in a crowd, so we definitely wanted to make that happen for her.




Here are my two favorite girls in the whole world. Just looking at this picture makes me happy. Which is a good thing because most of the rest of the weekend, they totally got on my nerves. Isn't that the way it always is?