Memorial Day 2014

This weekend was busy! On Friday and Saturday I spent two days at Segerstrom Hall recording a new MCO album. When I came home on Saturday night after a ten hour recording session I told Jeff that I had snippets of music running through my brain. He said 'Me too!' I said 'What's yours?' and he started singing the theme tune to Monster Math Squad... Kate and Nicholas' current favourite Netflix pick. Makes sense, given that he had had sole charge of them for two days! Mine was 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free....' from Brett's arrangement of 'The New Colossus' - running over and over in my head on continuous playback. Fortunately it is an utterly gorgeous line from the song, so I didn't mind that my head was making me listen to it about a hundred times. I have noticed that it takes me a while to recover from concerts and/or recordings. It takes a good two to three days before my head stops singing at me! Actually I love it, because the snippets that get stuck in my head are always gorgeous. The album is going to be all American patriotic music... but the arrangements are so good that I don't even mind and can't wait to get it!

On Sunday we hung out all day with friends from Arizona who sing in the Arizona MCO and were in town for the same recording. We used to be neighbours a decade ago when Adam was a baby. Now we have eight kids between us and we had a great day catching up.  It was relaxing and fun!

On Monday, Ellie spent most of her morning up a tree

and Jeff and I spent most of the morning chopping one down! This was the front of our house when we bought it eight years ago exactly - we moved in on Memorial Day weekend, 2006. Look at the size of the palm tree.

It has grown about eight feet in eight years and is constantly dropping dead leaves on us, as well as totally blocking the bedroom window. It was time for it to go.

So it went.

I'm not sure if Jeff should be allowed to be in charge of these things... or why I agree to them....

But we have a beautifully open front garden full of possibilities... it's going to take a few more weekends to sort it out. After we were done chopping down trees we went out for a late lunch and took all the kids to the movies - the first time we've been together as a family. As far as a bank holidays go, it was a pretty perfect day. We're happy, busy, fulfilled and looking forward to the start of summer!