Dancing, Illness, Joy

We had a very busy weekend:

Friday night - supposed to go to a school BBQ, but just delivered some whole wheat chocolate cake and left to conserve energy

Saturday morning - Jason had two hours of placement testing in French and German for his new high school for the autumn

Saturday afternoon - Jason received an award for academic excellence at his current school's graduation ceremony. David took Jason (David got to sit next to his boss, who also has kids at Jason's school), and I stayed home to rest, watching the program over live streaming video online (what a cool service the school's webmaster offered, wow! The world is more and more amazing). I was feeling low-energy and suspicious in the throat domain (Jason had been ill with sore throat and fatigue previously).

Saturday evening - our family led another 18th Century Dance Evening at our church, for 28 people. We all had a lot of fun. We danced the following dances:

• Gay Gordon • In Out & Across • Sheena's Saunter • Sellenger's Round • Patty Cake Polka • Virginia Reel • Gay Gordon as a jig • Soldier's Joy • French Girl • Final Waltz
(except the music file for the Patty Cake Polka somehow got corrupted and wouldn't play right, so we had to stop in the middle :-( )

Those are ALL the dances that I currently know the steps to! I am planning on learning some new ones with virtual help from the caller I learned these from, since our kids want to move on to some less familiar ones.

Due to generous prayers from several friends, and God's grace in answering, I didn't start to lose my voice until JUST AFTER the last dance of the evening! 10 guests from the general ex-pat community joined us, which was wonderful to see. They seemed to have fun and in fact sent some lovely emails afterwards confirming that.

Then, Sunday morning - we were all scheduled to help lead the worship at church (David on sound board, Jason on drums, Emily on keyboard, me singing). I croaked through the practice and completely lost any singing capacity by the time the service started. So I sat down and the pastor's 12-yr-old daughter did a great job holding up the ladies' part on her own.

Sunday afternoon - REST. Down time. "Flat on Bunk" as they used to say at the homeschool science camp we went to in Northern California. Much-needed recharging time. It was a great, busy, joyful, fun, full, social weekend. We can't survive too many of those in rapid succession. We're really a homebody, quiet, laid-back kind of family that takes restorative weekends seriously. :-)