One Very Long Day

June 29th turned out to be one of the busiest days of our year so far. We had planned to go to the LDS temple in London a long time ago. I actually had to write it down on our calendar that it had to be done on that particular Saturday since the temple was scheduled to close for cleaning beginning the last week of August.

At first it was just the temple, then we had our church picnic added to the day’s schedule—that was at four o’clock. And then our piano teacher scheduled final piano recital for that evening at six.

To get to the temple, we had to leave promptly at 8 am since the drive there takes almost two and a half hours. Traffic was in our favor so we got there without many adventures.

We had some yummy Thai food for lunch on temple grounds and then while waiting for Robert, I snapped a few pictures.  Kids were just running around and having fun.

Wait, wrong picture!

This is Mark’s upset face. Someone probably was faster than him at racing so he got a bit disappointed. It’s hard to be the smallest sometime.

Most of the time, everyone was happy though:)

Even when people were squishing each other.

Thank you, Mark, we love to see your dirty feet.

And this is my attempt to put all kids in a “circle” so that I could get their head shot. Mark couldn’t figure that out.

Brothers who squish and wrestle each other all the time.

Around 2 pm, we started driving back up to Huntingdon where our church picnic was going to happen. We basically had only an hour to chat with people and get our dinner. It was rushed, but we still had fun. I like how we are making more and more friends through our church—this time it has been a much slower process.

Then we drove up home, changed and ran to the kids’ piano recital at the Abbey College hall. This is our teacher, Mrs. Eldred.

Twenty five kids (!) played at this recital. Most of them performed just one super-short piece (some were as short as thirty seconds), so the whole thing went pretty fast. Most students are very much beginners because they are simply kids from regular primary (elementary) schools that Mrs. Eldred teaches during school hours. She has only a few private students like us who have her come to teach them at their homes.

The kids did great. I told them to bow at the end of their performance. So Alex was the first kid in the whole recital who bowed. Everyone was so surprised, in a good way. I figured that’s just plain proper manners at a piano recital, right?

Glad we managed to fit all our events into this crazy day! And glad we got to go to the temple.