Whew! The past couple weeks have been full of fun activities. We kicked things off almost two weeks ago with Emma’s year-end dance recital and it went great! The recital kind of snuck up on me this year, but after last year I knew what to expect. The studio changed the timing, so instead of a mid-afternoon performance, the show started at 6:00. This made the day nicer on the front end, since we didn’t have to be at the venue (a local middle school) so early, but it led to a pretty long afternoon and evening. We got there at 1:45 for the dress rehearsal and the show didn’t end until almost 7:30. Thankfully Emma had plenty of friends to hang out with to pass the time, and I enjoyed hanging out with the other parents.
There was a very noticeable difference in the actual performance too! Older kids are more capable at dancing and less overwhelmed by the stage and lights than younger kids — which is, of course, totally obvious and to be expected. Emma’s group of 4 and 5 year old kiddos did such a great job! I was pretty impressed, and super proud of my tiny dancer.
—
Last weekend took a turn for the crazy when a piece of hardware (a multiplexer/demutiplexer or MDM) on the space station failed. It didn’t immediately cause issues, but it left the ISS “zero fault tolerant” to another failure — in other words, if one more thing failed, we’d lose several critical functions. When this kind of thing happens, it’s in NASA’s best interest to replace the failed piece of hardware as quickly as possible and since this item was outside, that meant sending the astronauts on a spacewalk! Did I mention the failure happened on Saturday? Which meant I spent half of my Sunday at work helping the team get all our ducks in a row before sending the crew on what was ultimately a successful spacewalk and hardware replacement on Tuesday. Fortunately, on Sunday I was able to hand things over to my backup by midafternoon because…
—
…I had previously gotten tickets to a Sunday evening Cirque du Soleil show for Jose’s birthday! It was the very last performance of Kurios before the show left Houston and as expected, it was great. We’ve been to several Cirque shows over the years now, and they always seem to be here in the spring which is perfect for both of our birthdays. We had a lovely time.
—
On Monday night we went out for dinner as a family to celebrate Jose’s birthday. We rarely go out to dinner on weekdays because it can get a little dicey with the girls after a long day at work and school. Jose chose PF Chang’s and it turned out to be crazy — as expected — but also fun. And when it took 45+ minutes to get my salad, the birthday boy ended up getting a dessert for free! Ha.
—
And finally, on Tuesday, Emma officially graduated from Pre-K! She’ll still be at the same school/daycare for the next 3 months until she starts kindergarten in August, but their summer program is more relaxed and I guess they just like to do the graduation in May. She was SO, SO excited — the teachers had really built it up for them. The kids sang several songs for us as part of the ceremony and at the end, the parents flipped the tables and surprised them by joining the final dance flash mob-style. It was pretty awesome. So proud of our Pre-K graduate! Kindergarten awaits!