This'n'That

Right after my concert, my parents came to visit!  My Dad had suggested we do a family temple trip to do baptisms, but I wasn't sure we'd be able to reserve a spot on such short notice.  But then Craig pointed out that we didn't have school on Friday, so we could just go during the day!  So that worked out beautifully! My Mom and I took turns sitting outside with Camille, who was good as gold for the whole thing.  And that gave us a chance to wander around sniffing all the hyacinths that were blooming all over the grounds.  

And after the temple, my parents bought us dinner at Chuy's, which always makes me happy.  (And, actually, we'd eaten at Torchy's after I picked them up from the airport, so it was a weekend full of amazing Tex Mex!)

Somehow I got roped into directing another choir for church.  This one was a bit strange-- so our ward likes to have "hymn book choirs" where we don't actually practice, we just invite anyone in the congregation to grab a hymn book and come sing during sacrament meeting.  This works pretty well for us, because we have a lot of people who are happy to sing, but most of them are too busy to come to choir practice.  So that's all fine and good.  But this time, for the hymn book choir, the pianist had chosen an arrangement of the hymn that had a (lovely) flute part and a bridge where the choir paused, and then a repeat at the end.  How was the choir supposed to know all this when none of it was in their music???  And they'd asked me to help out the week before by conducting it, so I didn't have a lot of time to figure it out.  

After much hemming and hawing, I did two things.  I broke the rules and actually held choir practice (for a hymn book choir!!!) that Sunday morning.  And actually a fair number of people came!  Way to be supportive, Rivanna Ward!  The people who came included my Mom, because I made her.  (But she did it quite cheerfully, all things considered.)  And then I made a poster board that I could flip as needed with giant words like "PAUSE" and stuff like that.  I should point out that I NEVER made posters like this for the primary kids when I was the primary chorister.  No, that's not true-- I did it ONCE, when we were singing in Spanish.  That was it.  Otherwise, I just expected the kids to learn the music.  (And they always did!)

But also, making posters like that is a big pain and I have terrible handwriting for it.  But I did it just for this.  And I must say-- the choir did GREAT and they sounded wonderful.  I was proud of them.  And, unlike the last time I directed the choir, I wasn't even nervous this time because I knew it was a terrible idea and none of it was my fault, so I felt like if it went well, I could be happy, and if it went wrong, I didn't really care.  Best of all worlds!

The following week was Amy's turn to teach, which was nice since I had my parents there and it's hard to work on stuff like that with company around distracting me.  My Mom was able to tag along to my choir practice, which is fun for me.  We went walking with Adam, which was very nice, but the weather had suddenly turned cold, so it much colder than any of us were really expecting.  Spring this year has been so wild!  (We warmed up after our walk by eating loads of chips and queso at Torchy's!)  And that night we ate at Mission BBQ before the kids headed to their Tuesday activities.  Good times!

Mom and Dad left the next morning, heading to Ohio.  And I ran around like a crazy person trying to get my house in order again.  And I wondered to myself why we hadn't taken more photos together!  I swear, I am the worst at that!!!