This week was full of fun activities—the end of year film festival for Rachel, Nathaniel’s final middle school band concert, and the senior honors night for Renaissance.  It’s so much fun to see the culmination of everyone’s hard work at the end of the year, and, in Ren’s case, at the end of her K-12 school career.

Top priorities this week:

• Graduation & recital clothing
• Graduation quilt progress
• Party decorations & ordering progress
• Planting last of plants in garden
• June’s hymns

Celebrate

Graduation party preparations are going well.  My credit card fraud department gave me a call this week to make sure my card hadn’t been stolen because I’m ordering large quantities of things from businesses that I don’t normally do business with, so that was a funny little moment.  We will have shelter from the weather and ways to keep the food warm.  Excellent party prepping.

I made a lot of progress on the signature quilt as well; all pieces have their top and bottom borders.  I’ve had a number of requests to mail blocks to people who will be unable to attend the party, and I need to get those out in the mail.  I ordered more of the white fabric because I think I’m going to have to either make a bigger quilt or incorporate some signatures blocks into the backing, which is an awesome “problem” to have.  It’s so nice that people want to share their good memories and well wishes with Renaissance.  She’s such a kind soul.

We went to a graduation party for Renaissance’s friend Riley on Saturday. We’re really there! Graduation things are happening! It was such a nice event; there were all sorts of band families there and lots of great people who are involved with the school in some fashion. Riley’s mother, Chrissy, has been involved with everything forever and wow, does that ever create a fantastic village for your kid when you do that. Good food, good friends, and the best picture wall I’ve ever seen done. It was lovely.

Gardening

I haven’t planted my remaining plants in the garden yet because budgetary constraints dictated that I wait until next week to purchase the planting containers and extra potting soil.  It’ll be fine.  Nathaniel is so pleased that we’re going to have raspberries and Rachel is really looking forward to her strawberries.  It makes me so happy to stoke their interests in gardening; it’s such a great hobby and skill to develop for their adult years.

It’s rained a lot this week, so the plants are well-watered and I haven’t been out to check on anything too much.  From my kitchen window it doesn’t look like the slugs have been getting to anything, so I’m optimistic that we got the majority of them killed whilst weeding over Memorial Day weekend.  Fingers crossed!

Community

I haven’t touched anything church music this week, which is OK because I always post a month’s hymns through the next month’s Fast Sunday, so we’re fine.  I’ll get June’s hymns finalized and posted during church on Sunday.

Highlights

Nathaniel’s concert was so great.  I am just so impressed with our music programs in our school district.  Proud to be a part of it all.  Nathaniel had a big part in one of the songs they played where it looked like his arms weren’t even connected to his body because he was drumming so fast.  So proud of him.

Renaissance participated in the elementary school walk through this week where the seniors go to their old elementary schools in their caps and gowns and parade about and talk to their old teachers, which I think is the cutest idea ever.  Since she didn’t attend elementary school here she decided to go to the elementary school where she volunteered and read to children last year, so some of the teachers knew her anyway.  It was even topped off with the PE parachute being brought out for the seniors to play with one last time.  Because honestly, gym parachute was peak elementary school enjoyment.  What a fun week for her.

At the Honors Award Ceremony Renaissance was awarded cords for a high GPA and having 50+ hours of community service, and she received her stole for National Honor Society.  A wonderful surprise that evening was the announcement that she’d been awarded two $1,000 scholarships from our community’s scholarship foundation!  Those scholarships will cover her expenses for her first quarter of pastry school!  We are so grateful for our community’s contribution to her post-high school education, and proud of her for doing all the work to earn those awards.

Renaissance will be playing her flute during Baccalaureate next week, and so she was flipping through our church’s hymn book and all the flute books for church and asking me if specific hymns were LDS-oriented only or if they were well-known in other denominations, and it was nice way to spend an hour together.  I was pressing quilt blocks and making my guesses and she was confirming with some internet research, and we learned a lot about different songs, some that I would have guessed were only known to the LDS church and then we’d find out that it’s been around since the 1600s and we’d laugh at our silliness.  I’ve missed doing church music stuff with my kids—I’m proud of their work in the school bands and choirs, but church music was where they started and I’ve always enjoyed doing that with them.  We figured out which hymns would be recognizable to people of other Christian faiths as well and she created her program from those choices.

Lowlights

I have a smattering of ant bites on my left wrist and hand from a Memorial Day gardening mishap and they have swelled up angry and red and they’ve itched and ached all week long.  I look like I have some sort of communicable disease. 

Rachel asked that her final film project NOT be shown at the film festival. She was heartbroken over how all it shook out. She loves making films, but this was a group project gone sour. Thankfully, her teacher respected her wishes and didn’t show the film.

The five-year-old dishwasher developed a hole in one of its hoses and leaked all over the kitchen and ruined the wood floor we had installed just a few years ago from when the fridge developed a leak and ruined the wood floors.  This is bad for three reasons:  1) The floor is warped and absolutely ruined, 2) We’re hesitant to make another claim on our homeowner’s insurance and risk our rates going through the roof, and 3) Our family must handwash the dishes until the replacement dishwasher shows up next week, and a family of six creates a lot of dirty dishes.  It’s been a moderate source of stress.  One of my work arounds has been to have whoever is on dish duty to start working while I prepare dinner.  I like the results so much that I may keep this arrangement going in the future.  *silver linings*

Another week done and dusted! Oh, next week will see me on the verge of tears pretty much every day…I’m so proud of my girl, but so sad that her little childhood is ending. I have absolutely loved being a mama to these sweet people. I’m excited to see where adulthood will take them, but do I ever miss pigtails and brown paper bag puppets. There will be new cool things! I just don’t know what they are yet, and that’s ok.