Busy
Sometimes I feel like other bloggers who write about expat life in France are less busy than I am. Or is it just my imagination? Life for them meanders by on a gently-flowing stream, whereas mine feels like it’s being heaved from the end of a catapult.
Although I’m tempted to blame life, I suspect it’s my own fault. I’m a magnet for busyness.
This weekend was no exception. For the past couple of weeks, I’d been working on our church’s annual Women’s Day. I’m usually the one responsible for the skit – writing and directing it – and baking for the tea that follows. This weekend I also had my daughter dancing.
On top of that, my son was participating in a national trumpet competition in Toulouse this same weekend, so my husband took both boys there. And two days before they left, the new workers we’d hired called to say they were ready to start the following day (which I said ‘no, not until after the weekend’ because I haven’t lost my mind completely).
The competition was great, even if Gabriel was nervous and played a little fast and fudged quite a few notes. He was still competing in an age-range above his own, and he still got a 2nd mention and finished with a score of 16 out of 20. However, he asked me not to make the video public because he’s not comfortable with the way he played. He’ll need to play the same piece for an independent jury in our home conservatory in a few weeks and if he does well, I’ll record it then and post it for you to hear.
The Women’s Day was fabulous. The theme was DANCE IN THE RAIN – how to keep one’s perspective in the midst of life’s storms. We had a main speaker from Dubai, who spent most of her adult life in India, as well as two local women who shared about their lives. Reine shared from the perspective of struggling with infertility in the African culture (where it’s not well-perceived) only to finish with getting pregnant and finding out her son was handicapped. She shared about the struggle, but also about the joys she has found in her situation. Laurence shared about how she lost her husband (he decided to divorce her), her job (which gave her immense satisfaction), and her health (she had breast cancer) all in the same year, and how (despite how hard it was) she wouldn’t have changed for anything the spiritual growth and closeness to God she gleaned as a result.
Interspersed was my skit, a mother-daughter duet, the African sisters performing a dance where they got the whole room up and moving, and my daughter and her friend dancing classical ballet – a piece they had choreographed themselves. We finished the day by eating all the pastries the women had made.
I’m going to put the video of the dance my daughter did at the bottom of the post. But first, here are some pictures. I’m sorry to say that some of them are likely to be upside down or sideways if you’re reading this from an e-mail because I uploaded them directly from my phone. In my experience, I’ll correct it and it works for the post, but not for the e-mail. I have no idea why. If you want to see the pictures properly, however, just click on over. 
