We are on this awesome team at church that does a Christmas musical (almost) every year. Steve directs the acting, Lindsey heads up the kids' music stuff, Andi choreographs and costumes, Jason is the go-to guy for any of your Christmas musical needs, Jeremy is the king of sound, lights and special effects and I...do whatever I feel like and take a totally unfair share of the credit for all of the hard work that they do. But this year it's really hard for me to do even that because I have these two little 11 months apart 4 and 5 year old full-time jobs with me at every rehearsal. Noon is not their best time of day. Check them out at 9 am...awesome. Play with them around 3:30...such a pleasure. But noon? Well, noon is lunch time, nap time, being by themselves time. Noon is not sit and listen to everyone else's part during rehearsal time. Noon is not focus on your job and learn where to be time. But this is the first year the two littlest amigos get to be in the musical and they are all about that! They know their lines (Noah's is "Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts." Eli's is "Peace."), they know their acting parts, they love their parts and they love to be there. But they are tired. They are manic. I don't know about other kids because I only have these three as reference but when our kids get tired, since they were teeny-tiny, they get manic. They run around like crazy people. They are loud. Their little bodies are all over the place. It's like they are in a race against the sleepiness and they are not about to lose. So each Sunday, we try our best to control that manic drive just a bit. Today, though, Noah and I ended up running many races around the church while waiting for his turn. And Eli was flopping all over Linds and, with his total lack of volume control, talking REALLY LOUDLY during the entire rehearsal about who-knows-what.
Now Grace, on the other hand, is focused on the task at hand. There is nothing Grace loves more than theatre, nothing Grace loves more than a spotlight, nothing Grace loves more than singing and dancing...it is like a little piece of heaven for Grace. Today, she demonstrated that focus in the most interesting way. We were all watching a small gaggle of girls rehearse a dance. Grace, who being tiny is in the front row, was dancing her little heart out with the angriest expression on her face. The other grown-ups watching and I couldn't help but giggle. She was really punching those arms to the beat and militarily moving her little body back and forth. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was going on. After the rehearsal, I said, "Hey, great job with the dance! Your movements were right on the beat. Do you think you could try to have a more pleasant expression on your face when you do it?" "Oh, no!" she responded, "Andi said we had to be really sharp." "But, honey, why does that mean you have to look angry?" "Doesn't sharp mean pointy, like mad?" A thesaurus or dictionary for our oldest for Christmas, perhaps?
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