Jeran's Christmas 2008

Make a Smilebox slideshow

It's winter in Utah

Cold, snowy and wet would be good words to describe today. As I type, the kids are roasting marshmellows on the fire (yes, again, for no good reason except we have a lot of leftover marshmellows from the other night). I'm wearing a shirt, sweatshirt and vest, and am finally getting warm. Winter is here. We love it and hate it. We hate driving in it and love playing in it. We hate shoveling it, but love looking at it. It's one of the reasons we love living in Utah, right?

Christmas Fun, by Megan

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Santa Rocks!

Nate didn't ask for a cell phone. We've been exploring the idea with him for a few months now, but Santa decided to take matters into his own hands...

A picture is worth a thousand words. Who says 12 year olds can't believe?

Merry Christmas!

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

Notice anything different?

Check out those straight teeth!

The trophy is a drink bottke filled with gum, taffy, popcorn, and other things to avoid while wearing braces, compliments of the orthodontist who has bragging rights for those straight teeth. I hunted in vain for the before picture, but for those who remember, you know what a task this was. She gets her retainer on Friday! Can I just say how much easier brushing teeth will be around here?

Sunrise Singers Rival "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever"

The first concert of the very proud Sunrise Singers for 2008 was last Tuesday evening. For those who've been following, you know that Megan, Joie and I have been going to choir at 7:00 a.m. every Wednesday morning since somewhere near the beginning of the school year. They go to sing, and I go as a pseudo director, whose job it is to keep track of attendance. We've had a lot of fun...a few mishaps, but mostly fun. It was a little less fun when we started practicing at 7:00 a.m. two times a week, but we were there, every day, most of the time with smiles on our faces. Of course on choir day things started to unravel. The school had some other things scheduled for the day of the choir, so the leaders couldn't get in to decorate until late. The two choir leaders who don't work ended up having to decorate, and by the time they finished, one of their car batteries was dead, and they tried charging it for over an hour in the cold, with children who were hungry, tired and needing naps! When we returned to the school prior to the performance to greet the smiling children, 2 very important things were missing...the cute little sprigs of mistletoe we were to pin on choir members, and the program. They were missing because the doors to the main part of the school were locked and we had no access to an area of the school to which we should have had access. I have to hand it to the choir leader. She reminded the children, "We are professional singers," and "The show must go on." They lined up in a cramped outer hallway, trying to reconfigure order for walking on stage. Within two minutes of being in that tiny, cramped hallway, the body heat of all those students warmed things up to a toasty 90+ degrees. Students were noisy and nervous. Since the rules had changed, all rules were off. One kid got kicked, a few were crying, and several were using he walls as drums. Choir leaders were resorting to extreme tactics to control behavior, the most irrational of which was taking away the concert. (Yeah...tell that one to the parents.) Just when we would have killed for some quiet, sanity, and fresh air, the principal arrived to open the doors to the main hallway...we had mistletoe, programs, a place to line up, and AIR. The principal apologized profusely...apparently the word didn't make it from one of the secretaries to her to leave the doors open. With the help of some parents we managed to get mistletoe pinned on 80 elementary school aged children in less than 1o minutes...and the pins only dropped all over the floor two times, once right after the choir leader handed them to a boy and said, "Don't drop these!" We passed programs around the room, and started a mere ten minutes behind schedule. All went well...except the microphones didn't work, the stereo worked a little too well for the specialty numbers, and the singers for the specialty numbers got cold feet. (And Joie loves to add, "Except for me!" and she's actually right. She's not only a good singer, she's a performer, and she's at her best in front of people).

We're insane, because we do it again next Thursday, then we're done until after the New Year. We've all said, "Next year we'll know...(fill in the blank)," which means we're all still committed to do this for at least another year. Like I said, insane. But in getting to know these ladies, I feel fortunate to work with them. This is one of those volunteer positions that fills me up. It gives back to me more than I give to it. Today after practice we were laughing insanely at the chaos of last Tuesday, telling crazy stories about our children, and commiserating about Christmas shopping still left to complete. One crazy performance can't take away from the good of this overall experience. It was kind of like "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.