For my kids’ holiday piano recital, their teacher gave each of them challenging holiday songs to memorize. After several Hadley meltdowns, I told her to just focus on Silent Night instead of the assigned two and that seemed to work like a charm.

Until she actually started regressing a few days before the recital. And then the freak-outs began, followed by mind games as she started thinking she couldn’t play it at all.

Bode was another story. While Hadley had lost her confidence, he was overly confident he could knock out Jolly Old St. Nicholas and Angels We Have Heard on High. The complication: he’s totally ADHD on the piano. He is always playing (just ask driven-to-drink Jamie who just wants a moment of silence) but Bode is all over the place and rarely focuses on just one song for long. At times, he was more focused on memorizing Hadley’s song than his own which, as you can imagine, went over stupendously well with her.

So, I was nervous before the recital but then I forced myself to calm down. What was the worst that could happen? So, they screwed up. Many of our friends would be at the recital so it’s  not like they were performing for strangers. I assured myself that failure and learning to pick yourself back up is a good growing experience at any age.

At the beginning of the recital, their teacher announced how proud she was of her students and how they had been assigned pieces a bit beyond their level of expertise. Finally, a ray of hope. Maybe my kids wouldn’t be alone!

And they weren’t. Though all the kids did great, there were definitely a lot of mess-ups and do-overs.

Hadley was nervous but she knocked it out of the park until the final few bars of her music, in which case she had a pretty minor flub. Most amusingly, though, was when she crossed her legs in the middle of her piece. Then there was Bode. The last one to perform, he could either be the grand or much less-than finale. He confidently strode over to the piano, plopped himself down and started pounding away with the intensity of Schroeder from Charlie Brown. The piano bench was pushed sideways, his brow was crinkled but gosh darn it if that boy didn’t pull his songs together in the 11th hour. Like Hadley, his flubs were relatively minor and he was all “I told you I could do it” grins when it was over.

He was in such an exuberant mood that as he was downing his refreshments after (one of each treat, of course), he jokingly called out “FOOD FIGHT!”

I’m sure the owners of the venue with their $25,000 pianos would have been thrilled.

As we were driving home, Hadley was in a much better mood. “Our teacher is the perfect piano teacher,” she raved. “She not only has us learn songs from the piano books but different ones as well. Then she has us perform them at a recital!”

We’re counting this one as a very surprising win.

What a great weekend! On Friday, my friend Amie and I volunteered at our city’s Santa House which collects and distributes toys to low-income families. I helped unload and stock shelves but by far my favorite was being a “personal shopper” and helping those in need select toys for their kids.  I’ve donated plenty of toys to toy drives in the past but being behind-the-scenes and seeing the wonderful people who are struggling gave me a new resolve to do more in the coming years.

After school, Bode joined some of his classmates to perform several Christmas songs at a local retirement home  How to score hot second grade chicks: land the coveted role of Rudolph.

Old ladies will also dig your nose and reindeer games.

Jamie’s sister Lisa generously invited the kids for a sleepover on Friday so Jamie and I could have date night at the Denver LDS Temple, which is a pretty darn awesome way to celebrate the season.

Saturday was a frenzy. Boot camp, picked up the kids, cleaned the house and had Hadley’s final volleyball game of the season. I have been the assistant coach for her cute team and they’ve improved leaps and bounds. Most gratifying is she has finally found her sport and constantly  has a volleyball in hand around the house.

It’s only a matter of time until she breaks something.

After that, we raced over to see the highly-anticipated Hobbit and Bode is already counting down ’til when the third movie in the trilogy is released on his birthday this summer. Translation: they loved it.

Upon arriving home, baking insanity ensued. Whenever Christmas rolls around, I start baking. And then bake some more. I have so many great recipes that I want to make them all so that’s exactly what I did. But I’ve gotten smarter over the years and don’t kill myself by cramming it all in on one day and started baking weeks ago. That’s what freezers are for, right?

Saturday night was about compiling all our goodies. This year’s haul included caramel toffee squares, gingerbread men, white chocolate snowball cookies, cream cheese cutout cookies, whipped shortbread and almond rocha.What I did kill myself with was packaging everything for our friends and neighbors then the massive clean-up. But didn’t they turn out lovely?

Bribery is how we make and keep our friends.

The cute kiddos made and decorated gingerbread men for their Primary class at church.

If you need us, we’ll be the ones passed out in the corner in a sugar coma.