Long Weekend

The kids were out of school Thursday and Friday, which makes me so happy. I love, love, love when we don't have to rush out the door in the mornings and we can make pancakes and just *be* with each other. It doesn't help me to get anything accomplished around the house, as I have a severe motivation deficiency and, unless I am prodded by deadlines or potential humiliation (like when my house is trashed and a tidy-house-friend drops by) I tend to not do unpleasant things like clean toilets and vacuum stairs. But I digress.

We did some lounging, and some play-date-ing. Wilson played in a basketball game where, I heard (it was at 8:30 in the morning, so obviously I wasn't able to attend), Wilson made a basket and the whole team did great. Eliza and I mostly did a whole lot of Irish dance stuff. Well, clearly she did the dancing part of 'dance stuff', but I did a lot of supporting and driving. So it counts. This weekend was Irish Dance Idaho's annual Celtic Holiday, the most beautiful performance of Irish step dance around. The final 'big' performance is two hours of thundering hard shoes and sweet, graceful soft shoes with eighty-something dancers and beautiful Celtic music. Eliza was wonderful and she even remembered to smile and get her knees way up high.

Busy, busy before the show started

I love this picture--a loving Grandma, a proud Daddy, an excited young lady, and a little brother who, as evidenced by his disheveled hair and wrinkled shirt just spent two hours wrestling with his ADD demons and the uncomfortable theatre seat

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Altogether, there were three performances, which equals a lot of rehearsal time, a lot of curling hair time, sitting around time, and finally, performing time. I have learned from the more seasoned dance moms to come prepared. Books, charged cell phones, crossword puzzle books and a soft jacket to be wadded up and used as a pillow. Mostly I spent the weekend reading this book, which I can hardly read fast enough. It is so engaging and interesting, I am dreading coming to the last page. It is a history of domesticity, basically. Why we live in houses, why we eat the food we do, why we are obsessed with salt and pepper, and not some other combination of spices. I am heading out this week to buy it, as I am hoarding my sister's copy right now. You know this must be a good read if it passes my book-buying test. My rules, you ask? Ok, a book must fit into all three of these categories before I will buy it. (Versus going to the library, which is much more economical and environmentally friendly. The mother of one of my preschoolers works in a bookstore.Thinking of the discount her mother must enjoy, I once asked the little girl if her Mommy brought home books for her from work. She cocked her head and answered, "No, from the library". My point exactly) Back to the three categories:

1. I must believe that it is a book I will read again and again. 99% of the time I only read a book once.

2. It must be a book that I think my husband, sisters, friends, mother, etc. might want to borrow and read. (Then I proceed to loan it and never see it again....)

3. It must be a book that I want to have on my bookshelves for my children to pick up one day when they are bored.

This book so fits all these categories that I am about to buy it in HARDback. Oooohh.

One of the things I have been thinking about while reading this is my place in the universe. (You tell me what you would think about it you were sitting alone in a darkened theatre watching mesmerizing dancing and listening to hypnotizing Celtic music for 12 hours, and then you can smirk) Bryson talks so much about history--and the gazillions of nameless people who make it up. Some of them, like famous religious leaders or politicians will be remembered. However, most people live in obscurity, at least in relation to the rest of the world, and just spend their days doing their thing, whatever that may be.

My religious beliefs say that nobody is insignificant, and that every single person plays an important role during their mortal existence. I believe that, I really do. But sometimes I sit in my house--my teeny-tiny corner of the universe--and see photo albums that nobody looks at, dinners that nobody likes, blah, blah, blah. I think of how many times I go to the same grocery store and buy the same food and get mad that the same lights are timed just wrong for me to get on the connector without waiting at them, and so on and so on. I really felt challenged in a way that I hadn't for a long time. Doesn't it sound so cliche? Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? But cliches exist because really we are all not so different from each other.

So I enjoyed balancing Bill Bryson's clever, wide-eyed awe with our fairly recent history (several times he poses the question of why so many amazing and world-changing events, inventions and ideas have occurred over just the past 180 years...I have a theory for that, if you're ever interested), with reading these words, which seemed to me like a gentle reminder of something I needed to hear.

Not a bad weekend. I hope yours was nice as well.