meaningful mondays: party week in pics and vids

It’s been another month of parties and celebrations!

Before I go on, let me tell you about these guys. We have, far right, our oldest, and in the middle, the grad whose mom snapped this shot years ago, and to the left of him…remember that face. Okay? Just remember it because he’ll come back in a bit.

The final of five grad parties we attended this week/end included the precious picture above, featuring our big senior and his friends back when they were around 4 years old at Vacation Bible School. Melted my heart seeing my now-big-boy as a little cowpoke, arm around his buddies. I won’t do the “time flies” mantra. I won’t. But it does.

I honestly wondered how we’d make it to the other side of this week/end. I had things color-coded in my “to do” list and Troy and I were both dizzy looking at it. We had to make some choices, do some tag-teaming, keep things reasonable.

I couldn’t miss this one.

Look at the smiles on these women. Those are not fake, I assure you. We’ve been together a long time, doing our Tuesday afternoon Scripture pondering, eye-watering, belly-laughing thing. We feel big and deep and find comfort in doing this together. Now, one is leaving. It’s not easy saying goodbye. But you just have to close things off properly and we loved getting together to offer this official farewell. Our party included a lot of singing. We’re all pretty creative gals and we couldn’t help ourselves. We sort of…er…forgot we were in a public place. No one stops us from singing when we’re gathered around the fireplace Tuesdays at our friend’s house. It just felt so natural. In the end, however, we “church ladies” pretty much got kicked out of the place by an irritated bar tender who was trying to watch a very.important.hockey.game in the next room over.

Oops! I  think he just needed a hug. Next time we’ll try that.

At the first of the handful of grad parties, our son’s tennis buddy, Alex, featured this cake patterned after his actual tennis racket. I love the tennis ball cupcakes!

We broke away from party #2 Saturday in time to make it to our younger sons’ piano recital. It was  nicely done, complete with bows after each song and piece, and we are still gushing over the progress we’ve seen over the last year. Here, Nick is doing a duet with his teacher. You can catch one each of their solos here and here.

Then Sunday night, our oldest daughter performed downtown with 30 or so members of her high school choir, who joined forces with a local adult choir and orchestra at a church to perform Faure’s “Requiem.” She downplayed the whole thing so I was not prepared for what commenced.

Sitting in the audience, and after a very busy span of days, I felt like I was being handed a surprise gift. Here’s one of my favorite portions of the requiem, “In Paradisium.”

And now, remember that face at the top of the page to the left? Here he is last night singing the solo from “Libera me.” Wow! And that with a cold to boot. I’m afraid our kids may not know just how blessed they are to be experiencing these things as teenagers. I guess that’s what we moms are for — to remind them.

So, we did make it through, and with smiles to end the evening.

Q4U: What made you smile this weekend?