The African Children's Choir

Wow. I didn't know much at all about the African Children's Choir until I saw them with Theresa and Chris tonight. I really thought Chris would appreciate it, since he's now at the touring level with the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus, and he sure did. It was written all over his face. We all did. Let me tell you, it was a PACKED house. It was a line 2-3 people wide, all the way around the church where the concert was held, and even though we got there 40 minutes early, we were lucky to get in. We certainly couldn't sit together. In fact, Theresa and Chris opted to stand along the side aisle instead, and really from that position, they could see better, because ... these kids were LITTLE. My gosh, the ages of the 26 kids performing ranged from 6-9. And they were GREAT -- all loud, in tune, and high energy. You come out of there with such a smile on your face and a tear in your eye.

Apparently, they had been featured in the finale of American Idol this week, and I had missed it. I just knew I liked African singing and when I heard they were going to perform I knew I wanted us to go. Well, it's not all singing. These kids perform to raise money for their orphanages in Africa. Most of them have lost one or both parents. Tonight most of the singers were Ugandan. They perform through the age of 10, and that pays for the rest of their education to adulthood, and they grow up to lift up the circumstances of their villages & countries as educated adults.

Seeing these kids live and in person was a wonderful experience. They travel with their "Aunties" and "Uncles", the men and women who chaparone their travels, help them with their studies on the road, and direct their performances.

The African Children's Choir

2006 went by so fast!

December 2006

Dear Friends and Family,

I hope 2006 has been a very good year for you. I feel bad for not keeping up with my friends and family as much as I'd have liked. It's been a very busy year, and for those of you with teens and pre-teens, you know what that's like. For those of you who haven't heard from me in a couple of years, my first news is that I went back to my old last name. The kids didn't mind, and the time came that it just needed to be done. On the job front, I never did reconnect in the programming field after 9/11/2001. I am now working in the field of property management, while in what little spare time I can find, I continue to develop my online maternity store. Sales have been up, but for now I'm keeping my day job.

The kids have been busy following their own dreams and interests. This year, Theresa (16) yet again won a prize in Congressman Kolbe's Congressional High School Art Contest. She placed 3^rd in the Fantasy Category, which meant a check for $300 she earned all on her own. This year, she also had ambitions that outgrew her high school, so she simply withdrew and began attending the local community college. She is now an A student in Japanese, and if she weren't so ambitious with her life, I'd be a very nervous mother. It can be scary, but sometimes there is just no holding back the baby bird trying its wings.

Christopher (13) and Nicholas (10) are both very active in the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus, a world class operation on a par with the Vienna Boys Choir. Christopher made it into the Touring Chorus this year, which has meant several weeks straight this Holiday Season of 1-2 concerts per night for him, and next year, as long as he keeps his grades up, means tours to Texas, S. Korea, and Hong Kong. The boys just finished the season with a fantastic Holiday Concert, and we have a couple weeks breather before everything starts up again in January. Christopher also plays viola and violin in his school orchestra, while Nicholas is playing cello in his. They both take to the stage like ducks to water, and it'd be nice to hear them play or sing together someday, but right now they are separated by their age groups. Like most ordinary boys, though, when they are not doing schoolwork or rehearsing, they love their video games.

I hope it has been a good and prosperous year for you and your families.

Best wishes, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year,

Suzanne.

String Orchestra Concert

Christopher, a man of many talents, played in his school concert tonight. I hate to say it, but his 6th grade concert was several levels above what Theresa's 6th grade concert had been 3 years ago. She played flute back then. Besides the children's work and talent, I credit the director, who gave them interesting and challenging pieces and let them rise to the occasion. In Theresa's case, I hate to say it, but the students were held back by being assigned/confined/restricted to playing nursery rhymes at half-speed. Blech. It must have been very painful for the students to play, because it was certainful for the parents to listen to.

But in Christopher's concert case, it was entirely different. The director, Mrs. Williams, really allowed the students to stretch themselves. All through the concert, a very strange thing kept happening too. After every number or two, one or two or several students would get up, run around, change seats, and pick up different instruments. Have you ever watched an orchestra perform Chinese fire drills? What was going on was that several of the students were performing on two or more instruments. That means reading different clefs, and different finger spacings and everything. (Who needs video games?) For one of those numbers, Christopher, who normally sits with the violas in the middle of the 2nd row, switched and picked up the violin right in front of me (me being in the front row of the audience, of course), and I was lucky enough to get a good shot of video of this piece :-) Chris' own handy little camera holds about 10 minutes of video, and I had asked him which pieces from the program I should video. He had told me this one, but he had not told me why. Here it is. requires RealPlayer

Boys Chorus Mother's Day Concert

Christopher has been a member of the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus (a world class outfit) for about a year and a half. They have three levels - a Training Chorus, TowneSingers who perform locally in public, and the elite world Touring Chorus. Chris is a member of the TowneSingers, and they gave a lovely Mother's Day Concert in the mall today. You can see/here some of it here (requires RealPlayer).

Happy Mother's Day :-)

Congressional Art Ceremony

Well, we (her father, brothers, grandparents, & art teacher, Mrs. Valandry) attended Theresa's ceremony today for her Honorable Mention in the Congressional Art Contest for High School Students. It was a very pleasant event in the backyard of Congressman Kolbe's own home. (He lives in a surprisingly modest house given his standing on the national scene.) Besides her certificate (included in the album here), she was also awarded a cash prize of $50. The big winners won several hundred dollars each. Theresa was at first disappointed that she didn't win the Grand Prize with a trip to Washington, DC, but hey, she's only 9th grade, and winning at all was a huge achievement. She's got 3 more years to keep shooting for the Grand Prize. :-)

More photos of the event are here.

Nick's Quail Egg

Monday when I went to pick up Nick from school, his teacher was most annoyed, because he had found a wild bird egg at lunchtime and was refusing to put it back. She'd sent him out several times to put it back, but each time he had come back with it. Everyone knows a wild bird egg has the best chance of survival with its own mother.

He did the same thing right in front of me --- I told him (in front of his teacher) that the egg will die if the mama bird can't find it, and he should find the tree it blew out of (being as it was a breezy day), and try to put it back in the nest. So again he went away, with the thing protectively wrapped in the hood of his wind-breaker, and again a few minutes later, he came back with it just as before.

I told him I'd help him find where it goes, and we parted ways with his teacher. He led me outside to where he'd found it, which turned out to be in the middle of his school's huge grass field, right next to the soccer field! Not a tree, bird, or nest in sight. Not for many hundreds of yards. And it is a well traveled foot area for lunchtime playing kids, and kids walking through with backpacks to and from school.

I had no idea how the egg had gotten there, but I reached the same conclusion he had. There was in fact, no place to leave it. I thought some kid might accidentally step on it, but he thought some kid might deliberately step on it. I hated to see such cynicism in my little 8-year old, but he's already in his 3rd year (k-2) of public school and has seen more of the world than I had at his age. Since he had realized much earlier in the day that there was no safe place to leave it, I asked him why he had never explained that to his teacher, and he said he didn't know, but he should have. (Pretty smart kid.)

So, of course, we took the egg home. I didn't know what we'd do with it, but I'd solve it somehow. Grandma Carol was immediately very upset. We didn't really know what kind of animal it was. It might not be a bird at all. Gila monster eggs on the internet didn't look much different (all speckled), except that they were a little rounder and much bigger. So, we wrapped it in a towel and put it in the empty fish tank left over from Chris' science fair experiment, and put a lid on it with a weight on it. If that thing hatched overnight, whatever it was would be a baby, and it wouldn't get out before we knew what it was.

I did some calling around to Grandma Margaret, a nature-wise woman who has much experience hatching chickens and raising goats, and she said it sounded like a (Gambel) quail egg to her. Gambel quails lay their eggs on the ground, hopefully all the same place, and only after a couple of weeks of laying does she sit on them, the simultaneous warmth causing them to all germinate (like a seed), grow & hatch at the same time. Nature is very clever, but sometimes just a little too clever. If a mother quail gets disturbed in her pattern of her chosen place to lay, she will simply abandon the first egg or few, and continue laying the rest of them and brood and hatch the later eggs somewhere else. Of course she was disturbed from that first well trafficked location. There was no way in heck she would have ever come back to that egg.

We cogitated overnight, Nick wanting to keep the egg, and me telling him we couldn't, because especially if it was a quail, I knew from experience with a hatchling Theresa had found at about the same age, that baby Gambel quails must eat in groups of other quails, or they can't learn to eat at all. In Theresa's case, the chick was mildly deformed and couldn't hit the ground running. It couldn't keep up, and so it had been abandoned by its family. So I knew we needed help with this egg. With Theresa's chick, we had indeed found a wildlife rehab center just in time who put it with other chicks and managed to raise it until they could be turned back to the wild.

So yesterday, I got on DexOnline and put in "wildlife" in Tucson, and begain a chain of phone call referrals until we came to a licensed wildlife rehab lady who specializes in quail & baby rabbits. We drove right over (me with my camera in hand), and she confirmed it was definitely a quail egg, and placed it in the incubater with dozens of others that I'm sure dozens of other little school children had brought her. She was worried that all the bouncing traveling it had done at the hands of a little boy might have hurt it, but candling it showed no signifiicant development as of yet. We didn't know if it was too late or too early for development to show, but she'd give it a chance in the incubater. That's the best we can do. Hopefully it would all turn out happily like the little cage of just hatched quail chicks she had right next to the incubater.

I took a few pictures with the intent maybe of turning the whole excercise into a learning experience for Nick's class (if not his teacher ;-) ), and maybe even of turning Nick from the villain of the class into the hero. He had never told her why he didn't put the egg back, but neither had she asked. I printed them out in 8x11's for him to hold up in front of the class today, and indeed the teacher was so impressed that she put them up on the wall of the classroom!

heh heh heh heh.

These are the pictures.

Nicholas' First Holy Communion

Nicholas made his First Holy Communion on Sunday (April 17th), and it was quite a beautiful ceremony. Chris and Nick regularly sing in the children's choir for the 10 o'clock Children's Mass, so Nick has been around so long that all Father Jerry could say was, "Well, it's about time!". Grandma Carol & Grandpa, and Grandma Margaret were all there, and aunts & uncles & cousins all made it a very big event.








You can view the whole (large) album here.

Theresa wins art prize in Congressional Contest :-)

I got a call today from Congressman Kolbe's office. The woman was actually trying to reach Theresa's art teacher. But she was kind enough to tell me that Theresa had won a prize in the art contest she put so much time into. Theresa had been hoping to win the Grand Prize with a trip to Washington, DC, but the woman was quite impressed she won what she did and she's only in 9th grade. So, she has a little time yet :-) These are her entries, and the 2nd one is the prize winner.


"Wassupsidedown?" (water color)



"Escaping Skyscrapers"
(print from copper plate she etched by hand - that's actually Theresa herself in the picture)

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Signed,

Proud Mom :-)