Band Concert

The band concert went far better than expected. After the last concert, I decided that I would not take all three younger kids with me again. But Howard needed to work late and the church party made all of my usual babysitters unavailable. So I resigned myself to hauling everybody, but resolved to do some things differently.

In the car on the way over I led a discussion about appropriate public behavior. We talked about not running in the halls. We discussed how we do not shout to our friends across the room mid-concert. We talked about how to be respectful the the performers and the other audience members. I then carefully defined some terms. “Stay with me” is not the same as “I can still see Mom so I’m okay.” It means that the children have to be close enough to touch. This is particularly important in the dark parking lot.

As soon as we arrived I handed out suckers from the stash of candy in my purse. I planned to provide a steady stream of snack food in the hopes that this would help the kids to sit still. It worked great for Link. Patches is still so small that he can’t see with the seat folded down, so he perched on the edge of the still folded seat. This, of course, led to falling into the seat crack multiple times. But he kept it pretty low-key, so I let it slide. Gleek also perched on the edge of her seat. She was completely absorbed by the music. She loved listening and identifying familiar tunes. How she did so mystified me because some of them were pretty hard to recognize. We were three quarters of the way through Waltz of the Flowers from the Nutcracker before I figured out what it was. After the beginning orchestra performed, Gleek became fascinated with the creak her seat made when she wiggled it just so. She turned to me eyes wide, “Mom! It sounds just like a violin!” Um…yeah it did actually sound like the violin’s we’d been listening to. I need to take her sometime to hear a professional violinist play. As each group came up and performed Gleek would decide which instrument she wanted to play. She is now planning to learn violin, flute, ocarina, cymbals, drums, harp, and piano.

Gleek’s level of excitement kept rising as the music continued. She was less and less able to be a passive observer. Her feet began to pound rhythms against her seat. Her hands wanted to clap along. More than anything she wanted to sing out loud along with jingle bells. I’d intended for us to all duck out at intermission since Kiki’s group was the first one to play. However I noticed that people were ducking in and out constantly. After each group there would be a surge of people leaving and others coming in to wait for their child to perform. I decided that we would give up our seats to some other family and we’d be gone before the kids were terribly over stimulated. Link and Gleek were a little disappointed to leave early. They were enjoying the performance. But I wanted to leave while I still had the energy to be nice about it. (Helping Gleek manage her energy was getting exhausting.)

It was the right choice. We got home and still had an hour for the kids to wind down. Or at least that was the theory. The chose to “wind down” with a rousing game of Monster Fight, which involves all of them pretending to be monsters and play-fighting over territories in our family room. Since they were playing happily I let the game continue until bedtime when all the monsters had a snack and crawled into their beds for the night.