Yuletide Chaos

What's up, gang.

Well, we had ourselves yet another chaotic, Holiday weekend here at the House House. Our calendar fills up so damn fast this time of year that there's barely any breathing room on one's day off. Taking this into consideration, I took a 'mental health' day off of work on Friday, 12/8, in order to take care of crap around the house, run some errands, do some Christmas shopping, and otherwise get a little 'down time' in before the weekend's multiple engagements came roaring in.

And roar in it did, folks. Check it out. . . 

First up was Alayna's 'gig' at the Dow Gardens. The Midland High Orchestra collaborates with multiple locations throughout the city - businesses, nursing homes, hospitals, restaurants, whatever - and sends out kids some of their students to perform little mini-concerts throughout the city. It's a pretty cool program, and the students can get volunteer hours for it. The orchestra teacher usually pulls from the Honors Orchestra kids, seeing how they're the advanced group, and so Alayna usually performs at one or two of these gigs per week.

This time around it was just her on violin, her friend Lexi on cello, and some other random girl on bass. . . doing a little concerto thingy, just missing the viola (not sure if one was originally scheduled or not.)

Dressed up for the performance, of course.

Kris, Mom and Abby went down there to watch her perform (along with her orchestra teacher, Ms. Mamassian) - I was back at the house, wrapping up gifts.

Mini-Christmas concertos.

Stamps of approval.

After the hour-long performance, Kris got a couple pics of the quartet (minus the viola.)

Would it kill her to dress up in quasi-formal clothes for stuff like this? Nothing says 'concerto' like Chucks and a cut-off tee. . .

The next morning, Kris and I ran more errands around town, taking care of groceries and more Holiday crap while the girls were both at school. Once they got back, we shoved dinner down them real fast then drove over to the Central Auditorium for Northeast's Winter Concert. Because Abby is in the 8th Grade Orchestra (shown here), we had to sit through an hour's worth of 6th and 7th Grade orchestral performances first (though the majority of this was the wait between shows, where they had to strip and re-arrange the seating.)

Obviously, the 8th Grade Orchestra is the best one of the night, seeing how they're the veterans and everything, but they ran into some trouble this evening with timing.

Abby and her cello.

After the show, which I thought was pretty good but Abby was super upset about, the Johnsons and us managed to wrangle our girls together for the usual, after-concert, in-front-of-the-Christmas-Tree pics. . .

Not sure what's happening here.  Someone needs to get this kid a helmet.

In case you ever wanted some pictures of Abby and her cello, here's a bunch. . .

(. . . and another one with Ella.)

I'm sure their teacher would appreciate the instruments being used like this. . .

The very next morning, bright and early ( 6am, seriously), Ella was dropped off at our house. Getting Abby out of bed at 5:30am was loads of fun, but both girls had to be around and ready to hit the road for their 8am Pom Clinic down in Canton, MI. The Northeast pom coach wanted the entire team to go, but only eight of the girls ended up making it. We were concerned that we'd have to drive girls downstate for this, but - THANK GOD - one of the other pom moms offered to pick up Abby and Ella from our house and shulttle them down so we wouldn't have to worry about it. A good thing, too, as that may have killed me.

A bunch of schools throughout the state sent middle school teams downstate to participate in this event, which was a free, six-hour practice session. All the attending schools practiced and learned a new routine together, then took turns performing said routine within their own teams. My own school's team was there, and a few of my students actually got to meet Abby (I had mentioned how I have a daughter on the Northeast pom team, so they were on the look out.)

While Abby was still away downstate, Kris and I headed out to Freeland for her annual work Christmas dinner. Dr. Anderson selected Apple Mountain for the evening, and we rolled in around 6pm. Food was pretty good, but I only ate like half of mine and ended up boxing up the rest for a future lunch or whatever (I ordered a steak sandwich and they basically took a 12 oz tenderloin and slapped it between two huge loaves of bread, it was enormous.)

After dinner (which took a couple hours), the staff requested a group pic in front of the tree. This picture sealed the deal for Yours Truly: I'm getting a f***ing haircut. My receding hairline doesn't work with hair pulled back, gonna have to cut off my long, luscious locks. . .

The next morning, everyone had to scramble in order to make an early morning Advent church service downtown at First United Methodist Church (Kris' old church) because some bishop she likes hearing was doing the sermon. By the time we got back home around lunchtime, Kris started making practice batches of cake-cookies (I guess that's a thing?) in order to brush up on her baking skills for next weekend's big Christmas party over at the Sheahan's place.

These were really, really sweet - like, you can eat one bite before going into shock. She's gonna have to scale it back for next weekend.

In the afternoon, the girls at youth group over at the other church, and while they were out of the house Kris and I headed into the basement and wrapped up all the frickin' Christmas presents we've accumulated thus far. While we were doing this (and I apologize for not getting any pictures of this hours-long process, by the way), we did a Christmas movie marathon. Klaus, White Christmas, and my personal second-favorite Christmas movie, A Muppet Family Christmas.

After the presents were taken care of, the girls returned home, we had dinner, and then settled into another Holiday movie session. Thus concludes one of the busiest weekends we've had in a long, long time, folks. 'Tis the f***ing Season. . .

- Brian