Plans

Okay, the general plan for this week was to have a few quiet days taking the kids to the pool, maybe getting a haircut, maybe making an appointment with an opthamologist, and generally recovering from the Big Stressful Event aluded to in my previous post (the BSE was actually the An Samhra Feis, about which more later).

Much staring at the wall was planned. Also, I'm starting to feel guilty about not planning out our next year of homeschooling, other than a vague idea to continue what we've been doing so far. It seems like I should be planning it down to the week, at least, if not down to the day. Other homeschoolers are posting their Big Plans, or at least mentioning that they have Big Plans. I am so very UnPlanned. Yikes!

But now my plan for my planning week has already been shot down, as I have discovered that we are having out of town visitors for much of the week.

In other words, I am apparently unable to even plan on planning.

Ah well.

The feis went well Saturday, as far as I could tell. We've only been to one feis before, back in February, so we don't have a huge feild of comparison. The one in February seemed like mayhem, but I think the first feis you ever walk into ALWAYS appears to be mayhem (plus that one had icky weather, and was the same weekend as the Mardi Gras parade nearby, which made parking tough, and meant many drinking parade-goers wearing Mardi Gras beads were wandering around outside the hotel, while hundreds of girls with those surrealistic curly wigs and gaudy dresses were wandering around inside the hotel, and, well, it was just mind boggling). We came away Saturday with some medals and some new friendships, which I think is a pretty good thing. Parking was bad, although I expected that, given the venue. Kid1 broke a bracket eating a cup of ice cream from the Cold Stone Creamery there, so that was pretty weird (another unplanned event -- a trip to the orthodontist this afternoon).

I still have reels playing in my head. Listening to 4 hours straight of Irish music will do that to you. I can't imagine what it's like to have to stay there all day for the later competitions. Let that be a warning to those of you considering Irish Dance as a hobby.

(A year ago I would've read this post and wondered what the heck a "feis" is. It's an Irish Dance contest. The world of Irish Dancing is very ... unique and unexpected. There were over 800 people entered in this feis; I saw maybe a dozen boys, and 3 adults amongst the competitors. The rest were girls, almost all of whom had The Hair and some variation of The Dress. You have to see it to believe it.)