Our Busy Life

 I recently wrote about our pre-COVID life and our post-COVID return to life. Now I’ll talk about the craziness that is our current routine. 

During COVID, our life slowed down a lot. Our work life didn’t change that much, as the girls and I were still doing school at home. We would try to get to park day on Thursdays, and we hung out with the Metzgers, who were our pod. Edward was home more, but he still taught and prepped, and graded. He spent lots of time upstairs, so we didn’t see him much more. He did get some more house work done, and he got yard work done. 

In fall of 2020, Edward went back to campus, but we didn’t return to other activities until after vaccinations in spring of 2021. That spring was pretty crazy as we moved (see previous post) and I had books at both the CHEC and TACHE book sales that May. Collecting books and pricing them when your house is full of boxes and you’re still schooling your children is a hard thing to do! I had prepped several boxes before the move, but they all ended up in our living room on the day of the move. Still, I’d call both sales a success. The money went toward teacher back-pay for Legacy.

After that chaotic spring, we had our summer trips. But this post is mostly about our life getting to its new normal. In the fall of 2021, we began to add back into our lives the things we’d lost during the pandemic, and we picked up a few more activities along the way. My kids were a little older, and there were more options for extra curricular fun. 

The first thing we did was reinstate live music lessons for the girls. Molly had been doing them sporadically over the year. Her violin teacher is wonderful and a good friend of mine. Her life was also in flux, so we returned to the studio only to have it shut down in October. Milli has begun taking piano there, as well. Miss Lily was Molly’s teacher for one month shy of 5 years and it was hard to leave her. But she needed a season of rest from teaching other children (she homeschools her brood), so she recommended the Roberts Violin Studio in Kilgore. We began Molly there in November of 2021 and Milli with piano in January of 2022. 

This is actually an older picture from 2019, but I couldn't find a newer one of the two of them.

As much as we love and miss Miss Lily, having a different teaching style has been good for Molly’s development as a player. She spent 2 months with Miss Samantha and then changed to Mrs. Roberts in January. Both women taught very differently than Miss Lily and Molly has stretched to change (which is not her forte). Both my girls played for a much larger audience for their recital in the spring. My husband even accompanied Molly on piano!

This was the rehearsal- Molly dressed up on the day.

Aside from instruments, my daughters also joined the Greater Longview Area Children’s Chorus in September of 2021. This choir was a new group set up by several music teachers in the area (they also formed the Longview Chamber Singers, which we saw perform earlier that year). This choir is specifically geared toward music training- there is a lot of theory and voice training involved, not just fun singing together. I watched the children improve over the course of the year. 

My kids are right in the center.

When the choir started up again this fall, they worked out a few more kinks, and I am even more impressed! I’ve been volunteering more and have gotten to sit in on both the choirs (there are two levels for those with different music experience). I’m proud to have my children in this choir and love seeing them grown in another musical area!

I’m also back in the Civic Chorus! The chorus got back together spring of 2021, but I waited until I was fully vaccinated to join back up. Plus, I was moving that spring. Fall of 2021, we sat 6 feet apart and could wear masks if we chose. We lost almost all of the Civic members, so our director, Jim Taylor, combined us with the LeTourneau Singers. We’d sung concerts with them before, so it was not a hard change. Our meeting time changed from Monday nights to options of either Tuesday or Thursday or both nights. I chose both and have loved it! My relationship with students has branched out to many I would not have met otherwise. I’m in the Civic Chorus again this year and still loving it! 

This was chapel- I'm the second on the right in the front row

Molly also joined the junior orchestra this year! The first day was pretty hard for her. She was nervous, had so sight read at speed, which she has never really done well, and was with all bigger kids than herself. She went home crying hard over the whole thing. But the next week was better. And this past week, she even said that she felt like she had some of the best technique of all the members. She is stretching and growing in confidence and that is exactly what we wanted to see! (Although, you can't see it because I have yet to get any pictures of her in orchestra- wait until her concert in December, then I'll have some for sure).

Milli will be performing in her first play next month! She has been begging me to let her do Artsview Children’s Theatre for a couple of years, but it hasn’t fit in our schedule. I got her in for the December show, which begins practice  right after her choir concert and Thanksgiving. 

Other activities that we’ve started back up: Crochet Club (I’ll do a separate post on this), MEK (board game and anime club at LeTu that died in 2019 but has been revived), Alpha Omega (fraternity that my husband sponsors), having students over for Sunday dinner, and AWANA (this is new for us last year, but Ed did it as a kid, so I counted it as returning). 

Yup- our lives went from zero to 100 pretty darn fast. Welcome back to the land of living!