A Chinese Garden Festival

Sundays... a day of rest... in theory, at least. But not in practice, at least if you're a musician. I love Sundays, mostly because it is the one day that Dave usually doesn't have work and we get to see a bit more of him than we usually do. But if you judge the success of a Sunday by the proportion of rest actually obtained, then my Sundays would be a miserable failure indeed.

Let's take this Sunday. The choir was singing in church, which means that we meet at 8:15 to run through the piece at the church. I am not a morning person, true, but without children 8:15 is a reasonable time to meet for a pre-church practice. But when you add kids (especially a nursing baby) into the equation, an 8:15 rehearsal becomes a figure of impossibility equivalent to trying to match my weight with a supermodel's or my figure with Barbie's... it just ain't gonna happen. But the perpetual optimist in me really believes that if something needs to happen I will just step it up and make it happen. And I probably would have if I didn't have kids. I came really close. I was ready. Jared and Camryn were ready. Dave was ready to take another car with Jackson later. But then Adelyn wanted to nurse. Now. (No ifs, ands or buts.) And Jackson had a fever, so there was the question of what to do with him for church. I succumbed to the gravitational pull of my kids' interminable needs and ended up walking into my 8:15 rehearsal at 8:28, hanging my head in embarrassment and mortification.

Then I was on to substitute for playing the organ for church. So after a mad dash to find someone to sit with the kids I rushed to the organ and tried to use the few minutes of prelude to run through the hymns I needed to play for the meeting. (This is all the more irritating because I had some beautiful prelude prepared from the wedding I played for the night before. But my limited practice time for the wedding- most of which happened with Adelyn on my lap nursing- did not allow time to prepare the hymns for the meeting, so I was left winging it.) Luckily my kids were abnormally well-behaved. At the end of the meeting Adelyn was still asleep, so I took the liberty of skipping Sunday School to practice the hymns for next week (when I am on to substitute again).

Between an interview and other miscellaneous stuff I didn't get home until an hour before choir. Mad dash to feed kids, pick up house and figure out what is most essential to work on during choir.... Big stress out as I realize how little time is left until the Christmas program... By the time choir is done and cleaned up, most of the afternoon is gone. 

At this point Jared, handed me an important-looking packet of papers in his handwriting. He had issued me an invitation to "a Chinese Garden Festival" taking place at our house that very night! (I had lent out a bunch of greenery from our house as well as some white Christmas lights for the wedding the night before. Jared arranged the greenery, flower arrangements, etc. with white lights on them in our living room, thus creating the backdrop for his "Chinese Garden Festival." Why Chinese? I'm not sure... I guess it sounds more exciting than a just plain garden festival.) Complete with the invitation was a schedule of events (music, games, dinner, dancing, looking at lights, treat) and a list of music asking me if I would play and requiring my signature. (Even my own son can't invite me to an event without asking me to play for it. ;])

I was more than a little bit worn out by that point, but he was so excited about it that I didn't have much choice but to accept the invitation. So at 5:00 pm, Dave and I showed up to the Chinese Garden Festival. We walked around to look at the lights (it didn't take long), we sang songs for our music and then we all played Chinese Checkers before making dinner. After dinner we sang a few more songs, watched the kids dance and had a treat.

So I never was able to squeeze my nap in on Sunday. But I have to admit that despite the absence of nap time for mom, I had a good time. And I went to my very first "Chinese Garden Festival." Beat that, all you nap-takers. =]