26 OCT 25
Can't get out the door on Reformation Sunday before the kids' waterpik falls into the toilet and mascara gets scrubbed into my sweater which is the shade of oatmeal but there's no time to fix that...
Back in an icy ballroom downtown under a dark rain...
Oxbear and Yali deliver us in a very roundabout drive back to church for a seven-thirty choir rehearsal prior to the service...
Meanwhile Patience is poised on stage at eight-fifteen to rocket into another reel and another hornpipe... French-braided pigtails flying behind her...
...before running around the hotel with friends... mostly a pack of girls dreamily following one of the young teen boys from a school in Kansas City... to hide the hundreds of tiny resin ducks Patience requested for her birthday... “Mabel put one of the ducks on top of a toilet” Patience later tells me... “but then it fell in”...
Around this time Oxbear and Yali wrap church with the annual sausage supper in the school gym...
While Patience preps for round two in the windowless ballrooms down the hall where... because two of the local dance schools are apparently locked in a feud... numbers are down...
By our one o'clock pick-up Patience has collected another three medals and two sashes to pile on all the other loot from the past four and a half years of stomping and floating...
An hour later we're piled into the Big House where cousins are laughing and tumbling around the inflatable bouncy house prepared in the garage against a cold and steady rain... and indoors there is homemade layered chocolate cake with strawberry frosting prepared by Big A in early celebration of Little A's birthday...
...and of course all the usual nonsensical conversation such as envisioning “Pride & Prejudice” as a superhero film with sideburn action or creative ways to help Francis scare his new neighbor out of building an Air B&B on his property e.g. renting out all the nieces and nephews to run around barefooted in early frontier attire and unnecessary levels of hardcore Old Testament names creating all kinds of unwanted behavior and noise in the woods next door...
And back home in a continuous rain where Puck is about to kick over to O'Fallon for the evening... and the rain don't stop...