SPT Challenge April 21

**Updated to add: Lori, you're such a hoot. Did you not see that I commented on my Facebook status to exempt working mothers from my smarmy attitude? Plus, you did enough work on last year's 5th grade promotion ceremony to completely tide you over through middle school, at least. :)

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(See? Little baby sigh of relief that today is an spt day because nothing exciting is happening around here. Oh, wait. Yes it is. Something VERY exciting. But you'll have to wait until later to find out.)

(I think in show business terms that is called a "teaser" .... not sure what it would be called in blog terms.... perhaps "rude and obnoxious" ???)



Self-Portrait challenges for the month of April as per Lelly's Musings. Visit her site to see lots of other posts, as well.

This month's challenges deal with gifting, and this week's challenge specifically was to gift a teacher, neighbor, or co-worker. Well, I don't have any co-workers, so that's out. And I'm actually gifting our new neighbors later today with a plate of cookies (assuming I don't BURN them or anything) --- (the cookies, not the neighbors) --- but I wanted to post this morning, so that was out.

That left teachers. Hmmmm, how could I showcase gifting a teacher with my time or service this past week? Let's see, would it be the three out of five days I've sat in classrooms, monitoring state testing? The day I spent two hours making photocopies for Kendrie's teacher? The hour I spent printing and passing out copies to our PTO thank you party? The .... (ouch! ouch! Sharp stick in my eye! OUCH!!!)

My favorite gift to a teacher this past week was the gift of time and chaperonage (is that a word?) that I gave Brayden's choir teacher last Friday. The sixth grade honors chorus traveled to Arbuckle Wilderness, about an hour and a half away, to compete in their annual choral competition. Six or seven of us parents followed the bus in our cars (because actually riding the bus with 43 screaming eleven and twelve year olds would have been giving the gift of INSANITY and I wasn't about to do that .....) with the idea that we would break off into small groups after the kids sang and tour the Arbuckle Wilderness animal park on foot.

Unfortunately, um, we got rained out. So we drove all that way simply to sing, then turn around and drive back home.

The *REAL* gift of the day was given by my old high-school friend Steve, whose son sings in the same choir. Our bus driver discovered about two miles down the road after leaving the park that the windshield wipers on the bus were completely thrashed and in fact, fell off the blades completely. So she pulled over on the side of the highway and sat there because she couldn't see to drive the bus. Steve and I drove to the next town, bought new windshield wipers, then drove back to the bus and he installed them in the rainstorm.

THAT, my friends, is a gift. Because Lord knows if they were waiting on me to figure out how to install those things, we'd still be sitting on the side of the highway.

PS. The choir received a superior score for their performance ... then won "Choir of the Day" ... then won "Best Overall Choir Performance of the Entire Festival" -- not too shabby, eh??


this is what happens when you let another kid use your camera and forget to explain how the auto-focus button works.