A Day at the Faire

Oh, my poor, poor neglected blog. And my poor, poor neglected readers.

September has been kicking my butt. Totally. We've been slowly getting into the homework/piano practice/cello practice routine. The soccer/football one-two punch has totally hijacked our weekends. The Husband's been travelling three weeks out of four (glamour trips - Nebraska and Kansas - whoop!).

And then I found myself flat on my back in bed all day Saturday with the stomach flu. Argh!

But I do feel like I'm coming up for air. We've said "no" to a couple of commitments and that's freed up some weekday evenings. The Boy is getting used to his homework chart (heh heh - we have him reading Harry Potter in both English and French so we get required reading minutes for both languages pretty painlessly). The Girl is plucking herself some solid Good King Wenceslas action on her cello. And now that it's finally cool again, I'm able to pull out the ol' breadmaker and crockpot more often.

But, since you've been so patient, a treat: pictures from our trip to the Renaissance Festival a couple of weeks ago. The Girl heard about it from a friend and begged to go. We figured it was a bunch of people dressed up and the odd minstrel.

After spending half an hour in bumper-to-bumper traffic and seeing this, we realized that this thing is actually on a fairly grand scale:

This is actually only halfway between our parking spot waaaaaay out in a field and the fairgrounds.

The kids got their Renaissance totally on.

Best part of the day - agonizing over and finally choosing his very own wand. With his initials carved into it! I've been Expelliarmus!-ed about 18 times a day since then.

Putting his chess club skills to use. Poor kid - that guy in the booth is a total grand master. We should have realized that the prize (that Shrek chess set) was likely out of reach given that it was covered in dust an inch thick.

A meltdown or two later and we were on our way back to the twenty-first century, period-specific icy treat in hand. Also pretty new headdress! I'm pushing for a repeat costume performance for Hallowe'en!