Tis the season

...for Christmas concerts.

So far this week Hannah has sung twice in the Nutcracker, Ellie has sung in the Chorus show, and Hannah has sung and played flute in the school 5/6 grade Chorus/Band show. It's only Wednesday.

Tomorrow we get a day off, then on Friday Hannah has another rehearsal for her Wescustago Singers concert, which is on Saturday. I caught a bit of their rehearsal last Monday and it was absolutely lovely. Hannah's really enjoying being part of it.

What else has happened since I last blogged?

We continued enjoying our summer holiday. Portland hit 103F which is Officially Too Hot, right around my birthday. So for my birthday we stayed at the Inn at Brunswick Station, had a lovely evening meal, fabulous breakfast next morning, and most importantly I got to sleep in a building that had air-conditioning.

Towards the end of the summer Renee and Sasa lent us their lake house on Lovell Lake in New Hampshire. Once again we had amazing weather all week, and we spent the whole time relaxing, arguing over the rope swing, and exploring the area (including Wolfeboro which is full of interesting museums). Hannah and I climbed Mount Major which was a fairly major climb.

We took it in turns to sleep in the treehouse, and woke up to the sound of the lake swishing gently below.

Then it was back to work, and back to school.

We have one in Middle School, one in Elementary School, and one in K-1 School. It's hard work! I'm looking forward to next year, when Ellie and Mark are at school together, and we can push them gently out of the door together in the morning to walk there together.

Hannah loves Middle School, but it is also tiring and a new challenge. She has to be much more organised than before, and her life is very full. She's quite relieved that soccer has finished, and that she can just do homework, chorus, band, Destination Imagination, and have a little time left over.

Ellie loves her new teacher this year - Mrs Parkin. She also really enjoys spending each morning recess helping her last year's teacher's class learn to read. She seems to just be quietly getting on with school at the moment.

Mark wasn't sure about school this year - especially as he and I took 10 days to go to Scotland. He came back and was quite confused and out of sorts about how everything worked, and he's only just really catching up now. I've realised that he's quite possibly short-sighted - he's having an eye test on Friday. If he is I think it would explain quite a lot. He has all of a sudden worked out how to read, over the last couple of months, and now he devours books, especially Elephant and Piggy books.

Back in September/October Mark and I went over to Scotland for Granny Vi's 90th birthday, and to catch up with everyone there. Mark really took to being the oldest of the children, and had a great time with Bradley and Rachel. It was lovely seeing them all together. In fact despite the rain it was just generally lovely to see a large part of my family in one place, and have them all to myself for a while.

Since then we've all been hard at work, school etc. Thanksgiving was a nice break, but I missed half of it because I was busy doing a voluntary thing. We had a fun Thanksgiving meal with Sasa and Renee and family, and the children all did a lot of not very much for a few days.

Now we're waiting for winter to kick in. It's been a strange fall. First we had Hurricane Irene at the end of August, which seems to have pushed insurance premiums up spectacularly. Then at the end of October we had 5 inches of snow, which meant we had a very bizarre Halloween trick or treating in snowboots.

That all melted (and our basement flooded after the sump pump failed), and everything got warm again. Then a week or two ago we got another 5 inches of snow, which also melted pretty much immediately. Since then it's been lovely and warm again, and apparently it turned out to be Portland's warmest November on record. I'm sure I shouldn't celebrate global warming, but when you get winters like ours you've got to appreciate anything you can get.