A couple of months ago my husband practically begged a member of ther bishopric to ask us to sing in sacrament meeting. He won't verify my take on things, but I'm pretty sure that is how it happened. I was okay with it. We like to sing together. We both have tolerable voices and his tenor melody abilities go nicely with my alto harmony. Then he told me the date was April 24th, as in EASTER Sunday. "Yea!" I thought. Okay, not really. My thoughts were more along the lines of, "Double dog dang! Do we really have to sing on Easter?" Some of those thoughts might have been voiced to my husband. He didn't agree with my idea of asking to sing a different day, so we set about picking a suitable song. It needed to come from the hymn book or the Primary Children's Songbook and it needed to somewhat address the topic of Easter. And it needed to be an arrangement or I was going to be bored out of my brain. Luckily, some of my favorite composers, the Beebe's, have written an arrangement of "I Know that My Redeemer Lives" that fit the bill. But I couldn't be satisfied with just me and Judd singing. Oh no! I wanted the whole family. My thinking was that even if we sounded bad, people would think the kids were cute no matter what. The only problem was that the song was pretty challenging and fairly long. So, we got busy. I spent time with each child seperately learning the song, either as an alto or a soprano. Clara (5) and Audrey (3) had to memorize it because they cannot read. We broke out into little solos and duets throughout the song and everyone had to remember when to sing and when not to sing. Reuben and I had to learn an incredibly difficult 8 measures. We are both really good at reading music but this was just impressively difficult and we had to bribe ourselves with a prize and play it over and over and over and over and over until we got it right. When everyone had learned their parts, we came together, over and over and over again, to practice it all together. And again and again and again. Every time we practiced it took 10 minutes to get everyone to stand still and stop talking, hitting, insulting, crying, moping. . . whatevering, long enough so that we could practice. The children also thought it important to critique each other during the song practice. We NEVER actually went through the entire song at home without someone talking and stomping away mad or refusing to sing. It was super fun! We never practiced at the church with the microphone. We ran through it one time with our talented accompanist at our house last night. Walking away, moping, and refusing to sing may or may not have occured during that practice. So, I was a little nervous about how things were going to go today. But, I hoped the kids would put out their best efforts for "THE REAL DEAL" And they did, and then some. They all sang their little hearts out and sounded really sweet, at least to me, and I think to some other people as well. I did see a few people wiping away tears. I think they felt the spirit, unless those were tears of actual pain :). At the very end of the song is a really beautiful part where we break off into two parts and repeat the words "I know that my Redeemer lives." It's slow and soft and just really pretty and the kids did great at following me. I've waited 12 years to have a big enough family with enough ability to be able to pull something like that off, and it was a sweet moment. Maybe in a couple of years we can do it again and include Emmeline. But, until then, I'll borrow the words of Clara, who grabbed the mike away from Judd at the end of the song and proclaimed," Goodbye, everyone!" Happy Easter!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZP5qUX8zCg this was our last practice. It was better at church because we used two microphones and nobody insulted anyone or pouted or thought about beating anyone.
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