Big Events for Daniel lately:
He lost his third tooth today, at school. Apparently when kids do that, they send the tooth home in a molar-shaped little box on a string around the kid's neck. Tres cool. And now he's got a big gap, front right. Tres cute.
We finished reading Harriet Tubman: Conductor of the Underground Railroad. It's funny the things kids latch on to. It took slowly at first, since the book starts with her horrible childhood slavery, but right about the part where she escaped from Maryland, he really, really got into it. We raced through the rest of the book. Even Justin got to listen in to some of it, though I'm not sure how much of it made sense to him.
And yesterday Daniel completed his first "sticker page" at school. The kids in his class get stickers for helping the teacher, behaving, doing very good work, speaking French a lot, etc, and when they fill a whole page they get to take it down to the Vice-Principal, get a handshake and other ego-boosting stuff like that. His teacher also put a note for us in his agenda.
So here's Daniel's accomplishment, which made him (and us) very, very proud:
( Way to Go! )***In other news, nowhere near as exciting but still pretty darn cool, we went to see
The Matrix: Revolutions yesterday. ::happy sigh:: Of course it's nowhere near as good as the original, but really - what could be?
And I got a history-geek thrill during the previews. Troy, The Alamo, and The Last Samurai. Then I got a budget-geek downer when I thought of how much it would cost to see them all in the theatre :(
***Just came back from choir.
My good lord but it makes a difference to have a real accompanyist. We've been "auditioning" for weeks, and it's not a pretty process. Today we stumbled through the first hour with a girl who honestly couldn't read music. At one point one of the tenors was giving us the notes, and the conductor asked her to let us sing a capella a few songs, because she kept screwing us up with her wrongly placed and played notes wandering aimlessly in and out of our attempts to get ourselves together.
Then in the second hour, another accompanyist came in and the whole choir perked up, thinking it couldn't possibly get any worse. It didn't. By the end, we just about gave her a standing ovation. I don't care what we have to pay to get her to stay on - we need her. Desperately. We felt and sounded like a real choir when she was with us, not just a bunch of people feebly trying out some random notes.
Speaking of sounding like a real choir...
I really don't follow any religion, and even when I follow parts of Christianity, I don't personally believe that Christ was actually the son of God. I believe that he was just a very wise man, from whom we could all learn a lot, Christian or not.
But somehow, singing Christmas carols in a choir is what always brings me the closest to feeling what Christians who truly believe must feel. The music is so incredible, holds so much devotion and love in every note and syllable, no matter what culture it's from... it almost makes me feel like that kind of beauty can't just occur randomly. It has to come from something divine.
Today we sang The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy (calypso-style), Betlehem Stjarna (Swedish), a Bach piece, I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day (by the only Canadian choral composer I've ever heard write decent music, Marc Sirrett), The Nativity Carol... and they were all gorgeous. Even flawed as they were in their execution, since we're still learning them - they were incredible.
Wonder if people in church really do feel the way I feel when I sing those carols. If they do, I can certainly see why they go back every week.
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