Sunday Afternoon

Dan is in Denver this week and Michelle and Gabe are still in California, so it's just the five of us here at home: Theresa, Cathy, Anna, William and me.  With so few here, I catch myself looking over my shoulder a lot, feeling like I've lost something - or someone. Mind you, it's not exactly quiet around here (that's simply not possible with William in the house), but there's definitely less milling about of warm bodies going on.  And, as if I hadn't already had trouble adjusting to cooking without teenage boys around, preparing food for only myself and these three birdlike girls and William-who-never-eats is making me crazy. Anybody interested in some really good leftovers? I've got large quantities of spaghetti, bbq pork, pizza, and and chocolate cookie dough just waiting for a big appetite to show up...  Anybody's but mine, that is, because I'm on a diet.

Anyway, I'm glad you stopped by.  Welcome to our house.  Here's a little peek in the window at a slow and lazy Sunday with only 2/5ths of the kids at home.  (This is what you're missing, Dan.  Don't you wish you were here?)

A Musical Walk-through
(With Theresa on Keyboard)





Background Backstories For the Curious:

Flotsam and Jetsam from a Sunday morning.  We call the blue goo foofoo  -- Just the ticket for "slickin" up little boys' hair for Sunday Mass!  (Incidentally, I have no idea why we call it foofoo, except for that my uncle called it that when my brothers were kids.  You don't want to know what he said it was made out of...)



Anna is on a coloring kick, and was especially tickled when Sr. Corinne Marie gave her several coloring pages to take home with her from Saturday's work day at the school.  I don't know about most families, but we go through several different "play phases" every summer.  Some years it's cowboys and Indians followed by marbles or squirt guns; some years it's tea parties, followed by maybe faerie houses or dress-up days. This year, we started out early doing hoola-hoops and kittens,  and now that it's the dog-days of late August and too hot to hoola, the girls are teaching themselves to Irish Step Dance via Yootube lessons, while watching the hummingbirds fight for king of the feeder outside the patio doors -- and we're leaving crayons and markers all over the house. 

 

This year it's all about Nancy Drew.  All three girls (Theresa, Cathy, and Anna) are working their way through my old collection of thirty or so books.  Theresa just finished reading the Owen Francis Dudley series (aka: the Father Dudley books -- you can find Father Dudley's conversion story here!), as well, and is dipping into good ole Don Camillo.  But, Sunday morning is all about the comics.   Part of our conversation today will inevitably get around to a critique of them.  Everyone agrees:  most of them are pretty stupid.  But we all read them, anyway.



Always music of some kind going on in the background here.  If someone doesn't have her personal playlist going, Theresa's at the keyboard.  Right now she's teaching Cathy how to play.  Which suits me fine -- Two for one piano lessons are encouraged in big families, especially.

Not sure whether a couple kids finished a game and didn't re-set up, or William was playing "Guys."  Chess pieces are his Good-Guys vs. Bad-Guys figures of choice these days...



I think the picture tells the tale here.  Are you seeing what I'm seeing?