Naps

It's so quiet here today. Andrew took a morning nap and now he's asleep again. Gary and Maggie both napped this afternoon. I don't know if Paul's asleep or not, but he's awfully quiet.

Church was very crowded on Wednesday night; it was lovely. The party afterward was fun; not enough time to visit with all the people I wanted to see.

The house was full. We had Katie and Alia here, as well as our friend Jonathan from Fort Wayne. Philip stayed here two nights to take a half-hour off the drive from his condo to the hotel where symposium was held. Matthew stayed with us on Thursday night. So the time-allotment for your turn in the shower was not luxuriously long.

With the deacon out on disability right now as he recuperates from knee surgery, I had the CCA booth to myself. I think I missed a lot of Pr Stuckwisch's lecture as I tried to catch up on the paperwork & record-keeping from the sales I made during the morning coffee-break. It was fun to meet new people who'd never been to CCA before, and I got to talk to them about what kind of materials we have, and which materials would be more suited to whatever-it-was that particular person was looking for. For somebody like me who is a tightwad and encourages other people to be tightwads and who is the most low-pressure salesman you could ever meet, I think I sold a lot of stuff!

Gary and I tried to amuse Alia as much as possible, ostensibly to "give Katie a break" but really because we just like kissing her little piggy-toes and playing peek-a-boo and giggling at her.

After church on Thursday, Karin and Sandy brought supper for a crowd. Four homeschooling families and four other adults and two spare teenage boys (who thought my house, with its plethora of teenagers, sounded more fun than the party where the symposium speakers were dining -- mmmwha ha ha) feasted on barbecue and pasta salad and salsa and other sides, with of course beer for the adults because it was a bunch of Lutherans. Since I'm a lousy excuse for a Lutheran, I tried out those cranberry-vodka cocktails that people were telling me about. Pretty tasty!

We fell into bed exhausted. Some of us were disturbed by a humongo storm, but some of us snoozed through it. They tell me the hotel was out of power for two hours during the night. When we got up in the morning, there was evidence of abundant rain. Streets had flooded. There was about 5" of rain in the wheelbarrow. I thought maybe that was a fluke, y'know, because of the uneven depth of the wheelbarrow, but all the local folks who had rain gauges were telling tales of 4-6" overnight. (Notice I'm on the computer and not gardening in the mud right now.)

Friday morning were more sessions for the symposium. Then the teens helped me pack up the van. I took a lot less stuff back to church than I hauled to the hotel, and that was even with Webers doing a run to church to refill my empty piles on Thursday afternoon. We had much better weather for the picnic than the forecast had indicated. We unpacked everything back at church, came home, and not long afterwards we got us another doozy of a storm. Nothin' like the one 15 hours earlier, though.

Maggie got herself involved in helping at the academy's fund-raising fish fry while we unpacked books in the storage room. She wanted to stay at church and keep helping. Today she asked if she could help every month. Okay by me!

But now, we are very tired.