This has been one of those wonderfully rare weekends that had just the right balance of fun, rest, and rejuvenation. On Saturday morning I basically got a mommy-vacation: I went grocery shopping by myself for two glorious hours (because it still takes me that long to figure out where to find things and what packaging to look for and convert prices from dollars/pound to kilograms/Euro so I know if the item is actually worth purchasing).

After my little “shopping spree” I went to our church for a women’s mini conference. It was a beautiful event with a talented speaker, heartfelt worship, and delicious food–including my favorite: scones (oh my, the scones here are to die for. Seriously, one of my favorite things about Ireland.  The fact that scones with jam and cream are a part of daily life makes living here 100% worthwhile).

While I was at the conference noshing on scones, Jon took the boys to our local castle in Blackrock for a tour of the dungeons. Turns out, this was not nearly as cool as it sounds. The dungeons were not actually dungeons–it was just the basement, and had never been used as a dungeon at all. Very misleading. The boys enjoyed themselves as much as they could walking around an empty castle basement for half an hour, and at the end of the tour they got to go up to the top of the castle to check out the view (upon which David stated that he was going to throw his baby brother off the roof. We may need to work on the whole “brotherly love” thing).

On Saturday night, Jon and I got to go out on our first date night since moving here to Ireland. A sweet girl from our church came over to our house and looked after our (sleeping) children so we could go out to a movie. It wasn’t the most unique date, but it sure felt nice to get away from our house and enjoy some time together.

The big event of our weekend, though, was the Youghal Medieval Festival. The event was in Youghal (pronounced “yawl”), an ancient walled city in County Cork where people actually lived during medieval times–how cool is that?!  There were lots of fun events going on at the festival: food, music, crafts and medieval demos. And lots of people dressed up in awesome medieval costumes. We forgot our costumes, but we tried to fit in as best as we could.

We all enjoyed listening to the Youghal Pipers:

And we got a great view of the town:

When asked what his favorite part of the day was, David said it was “watching Mommy get scratched.” This is what he was referring to:

They had a tent set up with all sorts of medieval torture apparatus and drawings showing how they used to be implemented. Gross. A little girl was manning this tent and she convinced me to help her demonstrate some of the apparatus. She literally tied me up to this torture board and started hacking at me with a foam axe. I was putting on a great show for the kids, cringing and writhing in pain each time her axe came down on me. It was all fun and games until my tormenter went over to her table of torture devices and picked up a real metal anvil. I quickly slipped out of my restraints before she could finish her demonstration.

I have suspected for quite some time now that our son is crazy. My suspicions were confirmed today. There was an arena set up for toy sword fighting. All of the kids were invited in to use foam swords to attack some guys in medieval garb. While all of the other kids rushed to attack their targets, David ran in the opposite direction and started “stabbing” an unsuspecting spectator (David is in the green shirt in the left side of this photo). Thankfully David’s victim wasn’t caught too off guard by David’s advances and he managed to fight off the wild little beast.

After all of the excitement of the festival we had to get some nourishment. We ate grilled kangaroo (yes, the jumpy things from Australia–not totally medieval, but definitely different), sausages, pizza and ice cream. Yummmm…

 

A very sweet weekend, indeed.