Choir concerts

This week shall hereby be known as The Week of Concerts. 

Last night we had our stake Christmas choir concert. My mom and Josie came to watch it with us and—surprise!—participate with us. We sang a beautiful arrangement of What Child is This? by Dave Fackrell and somehow I ended up being one of two altos in the choir which made me feel incredibly nervous. I'm a somewhat timid alto because I always sang soprano when I was younger. But I enjoy the challenge of learning the other parts, and besides...somebody's got to do it. 

Never have I been in a ward choir with such a dearth of altos!

The only other alto wasn't sure she would be able to make and told me that if she could she would definitely be late. You can imagine my horror when I looked at the program and saw that we were the very first number (that's what we get for being in the 1st ward)! So I asked my mom if she'd go up with me and then gave her a quick tutorial on the music, humming it quietly in our pew, before we went up to sing.

The other alto did, in fact, make it. Andrew said she walked in right before we went up. Phew!

So we had three altos to fourteen soporanos and I don't even know how many men (our choir has been oddly heavy in the bass clef recently, which is a wonderful problem to have). Those were much better odds.

I should add that we also had Rachel with us. She's been learning to sing alto as well, though she (self-admittedly) tends to flit back to the melody if she's not careful. It does take some ear training to get used to singing a different part. 

Anyway, it went well and I was grateful for my mom's support (for coming and for singing) and for Josie for watching the little ones on our bench and for Andrew for pacing the halls with a screaming Alexander while our choir was up. 

This evening was Miriam's school choir concert.

We left Alexander home with Grandpa (Alexander adores Grandpa) and went to support Miriam. Benjamin had already seen it at school and kept leaning over to tell me to "get ready" for all the parts he was excited to see again. 

Rachel had also already seen the program, but she was happy to support Miriam as well. She also entertained herself with the camera quite a bit.



We didn't have her do choir this semester because she was busy with so many other things, but I think she'll be joining the choir in January because they're doing show tunes and she's a sucker for Broadway (and it's just one more early morning). We'll see.

Here are a few pictures Rachel took of us before the show started...

Andrew moments before a sneeze:

Me trying to ignore something goofy that he said:

Here's Miriam jamming with her friends in the aisle:

And here's Zoë dancing on her chair (one of the benefits of sitting in the very back). She loved every song:

And here's Miriam's full choir:

She is in the back row (weird because she's shorter than the girl in front of her), on the righthand side, wearing a Santa Hat, about the fourth from the right (depending on how you count; I'm not sure how to count)

Unlike last year, Miriam was very animated and did all of the actions with much aplomb. She sang with a big, open mouth, she danced, she swayed. It was a lovely performance!

We just need to teach her to find a window when she sings because she was stuck behind a couple of tall girls and there were times we couldn't see her at all (which is unfortunate considering what a fabulous job she did when we could see her)!

Two concerts down, two to go...