This and That - T's Patriotic Concert

Life has been crazy around here.... a flooded basement, mold in the basement, six weeks of flu-like symptoms because of the mold and the actual stomach flu, aunt Shari's visit, mold removal, oral surgery, gramma's death, T's patriotic concert, boys' first individual sail boat race, trip to California for gramma's memorial, end of school. So much has gone on. Over the next few blogs I'm going to give you a taste of it in pictures.

We shouldn't have, but we let T sing in the patriotic concert even though he was sick. We thought he was pretty much better since he had been sick for four days and seemed so much better, but he continued to be sick (fatigue and fever and no appetite) for another five days after this concert. He was all psyched up for the concert, but then must have gotten tired -- I think he may have fallen asleep a few times. He missed eight days of school in the previous two weeks. I think those were the days that they taught all of the hand movements to the songs.

They made these Statue of Liberty crowns in school out of paper plates. I asked how he made them and he said, "oh, it's simple, really. You just paint the plate, then cut out the spikes from the center, staple them on, and you have a crown!"

There were three classes that performed and each class wore a different patriotic color. As you can see, T's class wore blue.

Here's all three classes in their patriotic glory.

I attempted to record some of it, which I'll share with you here. Be forgiving of me in my feeble attempt at this and just pretend that you don't know that my husband was in the video business for years. We can just blame the blurriness on the fact that I had to zoom in so far from the back of the gym and we can blame the quick cuts from one place to the other on some guy elbowing me which made me jerk the camera (this never happened, of course, but I'm gonna place blame there anyway.)

See what I mean about the nearly falling asleep part? Poor kid!


Each class took turns playing these sticks. They'd whack them against their hands to make a tone. Each kid had a different tone. T said, "we were going to play the hand bells, but these were easier for us."

I love this Yankee Doodle. You can tell that they don't quite know all of the words in the second verse -- there's some mumbling and then you hear "hasty pudding!."

Don't you love patriotic kids? Gives me goose bumps...