maerchenbilder (36/365b)

A Monday with nothing in the morning, what a luxury. We kept Felix home and even Brian took things quite easy. Eventually I left for the afternoon and evening. It ended up being a little bit of a back-and-forth and here-and-there day.
Lesson, playthough of Schumann,
meet with Danielle s. who is visiting until tomorrow morning from dublin. walk around window shopping for random interior design things
back to the kons, for Schumann performance
straight to lindy, last class for the season. it rained again 3rd or 4th time in a row now.

Christian, accompanying me on the piano, was late for the performance. I was supposed to play near the beginning but I played last. That meant that Brian and the kids didn't stay for any of the concert. They just came, played ball in the courtyard, and then left. It wasn't quite ideal. When c. got there, he asked if I was going to play all the repeats. Yes. Ok. Then right before we played he asked again. Yes. Ok. Then guess who forgot a repeat? me. i felt pretty stupid. But overall, for the first time, I think it went pretty well.

monkey in the middle

Happy 8th Birthday, Henry turning 7 (35/365b)

He'll be the first to remind you that he's turning 7 and that today is his 8th birthday.
He'll also be the first to remind you that it's mother's day. The moment they dared to tread into my room they descended on me with all the typical presents that kids make for their mothers in school, with all the excitement that kids have from keeping a secret.
He'll also be happy to tell you that it's St. Servatius day, one of the ice-saints.

Even better? my bed became the place of a go-fish game.

all five of us. theodore in left corner playing card game while reading howard pyle's wonder clock
henry, felix, brian  across from us
me in the right corner showing my cards to the rather onery camera, disinterested in auto-focus before 8am.

We also had a wonderful conversation about infinity, where they explained to us that TWICE as many numbers as infinity would still fit inside Mr. Hilbert's Hotel infinity, and that there are an infinite number of numbers between 0 and 1, so many that they WOULDN'T fit in Mr. Hilbert's Hotel Infinity.
Then Theodore went and made me coffee. The last few days he as been attempting to froth milk with rather varied disaster rates. Once he spilled the entire dregs drawer on the floor and over himself, and then gave up on the coffee, i'm not surprised. Once he managed to fill and overflow my pretty large coffee cup with extra steam water. Once he got Centa to just make it for me. But today, for the first time, he frothed milk, all on his own, and even got a little heart shape (a trick I haven't learned after 1000s of cups)

<3 yum - it was also extremely yummy

so i was telling all the kids about the wise man with the jar
that old philosophy chestnut of the professor who shows his students that the jar can be filled with rocks, and then pebbles and then sand, then water (or beer) and not the other way around, and that those things are analagous to the important things in life. Basically don't fret the small stuff.

i'll describe how it worked with my kids.

there was a wise man with a jar. just a jar like our empty glass jars. he asked a classroom if the jar had room for lots of stuff in it or not. is the jar full or empty?
  henry says: it's full of air.
that's right. it IS full of air. and can you fit other things in the jar?
  henry: of course, if it is small enough to fit in the jar.
so what if the professor puts stones in the jar, a few big stones. now is it full?
  henry: yes.
can he put more stuff in the jar?
  henry: i don't think so.
how about little pebbles?
  henry: yes, he could put pebbles in, and then littler pebbles, and then even littler pebbles.
exactly, and then sand. and is the jar full then?
  henry: yes.
can he put more stuff in the jar?
  henry: yes, of course!
what?
  henry: he can plant seeds in the jar, and then the jar would be full of plants.

we call that lateral thinking around here. for some reason, i was dumbfounded, but i needn't be - it happens all the time with kids.


then we went to deutschlandsburg.

Theodore has been very enthusiastic about showing us where he went with chorus a few weeks ago. Train trip with the family. at 11euros round trip per adult and free kids we might take more train trip around here.

(on the way we stopped at lendwirbel's final thing: mothersday picnic, free food for all)

some unknown person captured this. it was very sunny and we were all squinting

Theodore forgot exactly which path to take up to the burg so we took a much longer much steeper one than any of us intended, always in full sun. No matter, we got there happy, just in time for the clouds to break. :)
had a picnic in a thunderstorm
came back a much shorter path by way of strawberries, a welcome distraction from our wet shoes and clothes.
brian took all the pictures.

HOW AND WHY?

reflection before the storm

Theodore is impressed by the canon

Watching the thunderstorm

Writing thank-you notes to friends

On the train

At home we dried off and played more cards before bedtime.

Felix hasn't noticed yet that theodore is telling Henry to ask for an ace

all or nothin (34/365b)

So sometimes I say yes to way too many things. Here I was this morning with a baptism to play, and I thought, real quick, maybe i can arrange/print some stuff before I leave to supplement those terrible arrangements we had yesterday. Then I still have to go pick up the car and drive there. But I need directions, so maybe I'll take pictures of the laptop screen for that. 

And when I get there, I find that the program we got yesterday for rehearsal wasn't even accurate and we were playing an additional piece that we hadn't practiced. Good thing we had the whole binder with us. When we were completely set up and ready to play, the priest announced that all the audience should come up and sit around the alter, since there were not so many people. So we would have been playing with our backs to the audience, unless we moved all the stuff we had set up and turned around. 

crying baby

They wanted me to be in the family + friends photo, outside, so I did one, but then dashed out, hoping to get to the Gestiefelter Kater (Puss in Boots) musical halfway through. I did. I left all my stuff, viola included at Jackie's (they still were not up, I'm not surprised, Lendwirbel is a little crazy) and rushed there, stopping only quickly for a to-go coffee (first one in years, except on the highway, when I have had my own thermos with me) and watched the second half of the musical.

the birthday boy at the opera house at intermission

Left Brian with the kids again, so I could go pick up my now repaired bike, and beat them home, just in time to make cake, snacks, and hope that people wouldn't get there exactly at 3. Well, at 2:59 the doorbell rang, and from then it was non-stop social activity till the night-time. I was exhausted.

birthday cake and flowers

all the kids

Brian's "no presents please" on the invitation worked pretty well. Everyone brought something, but they were exactly the right things. A book. A plant. :) Brian made a last minute treasure map, and they found the rest of the presents. And Henry got to open a package from the USA. :)

The day was full enough for everyone that I was glad when it was cuddle and story and bed time.

string quartet + extra (33/365b)

second quintet rehearsal in as many days. quite productive to meet often. Yesterday's hard work seemed to have paid off, so that's good. At home we tried to get the house cleaned up well for Henry's party tomorrow. We're not even sure who's coming. So far we have 1 for sure rsvp and some unconfirmed yeses/nos from theodore and henry from their friends at school.

Came home from rehearsal to find my kids cutting their hair ... again.

asymmetric is totally hip right now.

Eventually I took Theodore to his perfomance of Midsummer Night's Dream, then headed to a rehearsal for tomorrow morning's baptism. We started over an hour late. There is another violist because I can't play in the afternoon, even though she *can* be there in the morning. Poor us had to both sit through each others' rehearsal... if I had known I would have just let her play the whole thing. It was too late to change anything now though. We also got asked to play Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, but we didn't have the music so we just improvised it. Also we got asked to play something for string trio, and I was told I could improvise for that too, but I balked and made them change their selection to something for four people. Got back just in time for the end of the show to get Theodore. Looked up and said hi to Arcturus and the twins on our way home.

samples and paper airplanes (32/365b)

Salon orch. meeting early in the morning, we chose to read through the financial books and take meeting minutes outside in the sun. I got a little tiny bit sunburnt. Quintet rehearsal right afterwards, Irmtraud was running late with something important, and Barbara had a blister on a finger on her left hand, and still had playing to do today, so we did some intense individual work, with just one or two parts at a time. Difficult but hopefully worth it, we'll see tomorrow.

Manuela came by to wish Henry a happy birthday early, and stayed for the ensuing paper airplane race. She brought packs of testtubes with her so that we can participate in her microbiome study. I'm curious to see the results!

following folding directions

skin swab with curious onlookers

Ingrid had made banana ice cream (I guess Henry told her that it was his favorite) so we went to share it with her. It was super creamy and yummy.

banana icecream - oh so creamy!

Centa and I had to leave by some specific time to get to a concert at 8. I dropped the kids off in the bathtub, changed my clothes in zero seconds, and we biked out the door. Got there 10minutes before begin time to find an empty parking lot, and locked nor and neither a poster, flyer nor any information of any kind. Baaack home. Looked it up again. That's why Centa had clearly remembered "Friday" and I had clearly remembered the 10th... The concert takes place on Friday, May 10th, 20NINETEEN. Well, I've never felt so silly for being early. Honestly, I wasn't sad to just have an early night tonight.

unrecorded (31/365b)

it was just an everyday wednesday. one of the other kids from the fahrgemeinshaft had a tantrum that meant i got home a lot later than normal, because i had to wait for her to calm down enough. she had plenty of illogical and ridiculous demands before that happened. her baby brother was born 2 days ago, i think she was just tired and typical kindergarten overwhelemed, but still, it took 2 adults (me included) to pry a (very threatening) stick out of her hands while she screamed. awful.

i walked felix and ronja to and from the chorus. the whole time i wanted ice cream, and felix kept saying he wanted ice cream, and ronja kept saying she would have ice cream for dinner, but we didn't get ice cream. we just dropped ronja off at the lend wirbel office and took felix home.

nina came over for a movie (To Rome with Love - which, incidentally, is not the same as From Paris with Love) after I made my signature dish, lightning bread with veggie omelet. Nearly the entire way through we find out Centa's already seen it. Brian came home halfway through after some "dance karaoke" at the lend platz, and made us some popcorn and watched with us.

so there's no day without a photo, here's one brian made
just a tiny portion of the bikes parked at lendplatz.

lendwrbl (30/365b)

hump day of an artificially short week. Thursday and Friday will be off, but we were kind of pretending it was already the weekend.

After school we did our homework in a temporary wooden geodome structure that is part of the Lendwirbel (Lend is the name of our region of the city, and wirbel means "chaos" - it is an ostensibly unplanned week long street festival, that Jacky helps "not" plan, but it has to have some kind of order, because people like city planners, police help, street barricading and things like that have to be properly in place when there are 1000s of people doing "whatever")

Off we went to swimming, and then Brian and I went to talk about Felix's development with the Kindergarten (we determined he's doing fine, of course) where Henry just ran around. Felix had gone home with the Foersters. And Theodore was off alone at choir rehearsal. He does way too much!

Then to the center of Lend for the real festival, stopping at the grocery store on the way to buy all the material for dinner for a louse 14euros / 5people. Not so bad for "dinner out with the family" ;)

It was a day of meeting people i met when we moved here and hadn't seen since. old faces, mostly didn't recognize me. A guy who stood on his head on a moving turntable with Brian in 2015 at la strada (we have the video to prove it). A guy who helped me and theodore when I had a flat tire and have been looking for ever since, who I would have talked to but he disappeared out into the crowd before I got to him. And the really whacko crazy lady who thankfully did not recognize me who told me, when Amanda was visiting, that she thinks i'm "evil" and she "hates" my "eyes."

There was lindy in the street, most of the time I was spreading butter on bread so that my family didn't starve. I left to do some planning with our driving group, but left that to do a dance with Kris, then back to planning. I also gave a massage to a stranger, who I found out lives on my street. I stayed to help Jacky do some clean-up in the streets, but as of midnight there were only a few beer cans, and not a lot of other trash, so I just went home.

henry in action

look out, here comes a soccer ball!

planning kindergarten driving