Helping Out

All days are not sunshine and roses around here, and some days I’m nauseous with worry about how these kidlets are going to turn out in the end.  But some days around here are awesome, and every once in awhile these kidlets do something that make my heart sing and I have hope that they are going to turn out to be amazing people after all.  This weekend, for example, was an astoundingly busy weekend.  It was so jam packed with things that when everything was finally over I felt like I needed a vacation to wind down from my weekend.  My choir presented two concerts, which meant dress rehearsals and early call times.  We hosted students from Chicago overnight after they gave a concert at our church.  There was Sunday School and church on Sunday morning.  On Saturday several families from church came to our house to use power tools to cut out their AWANA cars.  On Monday all of my students came for piano performance parties.  It was nuts.  Good, but crazy.  In the midst of all of that Dr. Peds was working and mostly away from the house.

I couldn’t find a babysitter for either of my choir concerts, which meant I resorted to my fall back arrangement of  having YaYa stay home with Mr. TOF, and taking the middle kidlets with me.  The middle kidlets have attended several rehearsals (3.5 to 4 hour rehearsals) these past few weeks, but they didn’t complain about having to come to my concert at all.  In fact they enjoyed the music and talked all about it and the animals they saw at the concert, which was a fundraiser for Animal Allies animal shelter.  Several pets came to the concert too.  But, what’s even more, after they found out I couldn’t find a babysitter for the second concert, they offered to come AGAIN even though they’d already seen it once and knew they were going to be going to another concert at our church that night before we brought home our choir students.  They were so, so well behaved at both concerts (and had such interesting things to say about the music). They only asked that I buy them some ice cream for their trouble.  By the end of the second concert The Banana could actually sing the music.

While I was away singing, YaYa generously not only watched Mr. TOF, but she also cleaned a bathroom and straightened up the house for the choir students that were coming.

I was so grateful for all of them.  And, yes, maybe giving them a bunch of ice cream for supper before asking them to sit still through another concert wasn’t the smartest thing on my part, (oh, the wiggles and squirminess in my pew at church!) but in the end it all worked out.  Ice cream is a lot cheaper than paying a babysitter, by the way.  Plus, my house got cleaner while I was away rather than messier.