Keeping Busy

We kept ourselves fairly busy throughout the day yesterday and I was definitely ready for my bed at the end of it! The day was sunny, though still not very warm. Adrian left very early in the morning to meet his Dad and sister to move furniture a few hours away. He got home late in the afternoon and went for a nap! The kids and I just made our way through the day, doing one project after another.

Our piano teacher, K, stopped by for half an hour in the morning to review Andrew's and Nicholas' piano pieces for the concert her students are giving next week. Andrew was a bit upset that she had changed the pieces he is performing for the third time, but has gotten over it. I pointed out that the latest ones she has asked him to play he could have done with no practice time anyway. They reached a compromise and he will do four altogether, the two she suggested this week and two of the others he has been practicing for a couple of weeks now. Nicholas was relieved that he had a chance to practice his duet with her and it sounded pretty good! We go Saturday for a quick run-through of the performance, just so all the kids will know where they will be sitting, where they go to come up on stage and the order they will play in.

After lunch, we read for a while. We're reading the third book of Jeanne DuPrau's City of Ember series, The Prophet of Yonwood, and while the kids are liking it so far, I'm less impressed than I was of the first book.

The kids finally got to their math books and with a little prodding on my part, Matthew and Nicholas finished theirs. They need more supervision still than Andrew does and he had gone to his room to do his.

I decided after that to get my run done. Since finishing the Couch to 5K program, I've found myself less than enthusiastic about getting down there and running. I haven't been pushing myself and the result is that while I've tried to be consistently running every other day or so (well, maybe twice a week or so...), I have shortened the runs to only ten or fifteen minutes. Not very motivating and not getting me any closer to reaching 5K in one run! This week I thought I'd just walk the entire 5K and find out how long it would take me. I ended up running for about ten minutes in the middle of it, but the walk/run combination had me finishing 5K in 50 minutes. Yesterday I tried it again, only spent more time running, ten minutes here, three minutes there (interruptions forcing me to walk instead of run included Andrew requesting some help with his math and a phone call from Adrian). I finished 5K in 43.5 minutes, a fair amount less than earlier in the week. Now I have a goal - to see if I can shorten that time significantly!

Later on, Matthew and I checked out the veggie garden and noted that the lettuce and peas are growing well, the sunflowers are getting there and the corn and carrots are not up yet. Oh, and quite possibly two of our tomato plants have actually survived our terrible transplanting woes and the subsequent flooding from a rainstorm. We still need to transplant the rest of them, but I'm a little reluctant to do it for some reason! lol! Each time I think that the seeds are finally done germinating and we can send in our results to Tomatosphere, another one pops up! This has taken so much longer than I remember last year.

Matthew and I also watched the honeybees dancing on the allium flowers at the side of the veggie garden. I tried to get a close up of one, but the focus was off. The flowers are pretty though!

We did some more reading after dinner, I visited with a friend on the front porch while the kids played, and then we had a lovely visit with G & K for our prayer time. A full day, for sure, and I slept well last night!