Back in Seattle

I made it back to Seattle and have settled in nicely- falling asleep at the totally reasonable hour of half nine and then managing to stay asleep past four am! Life is good. The flights were uneventful, if long and I had nice seat mates the whole time. So, whew!

Thanks to Mical and Dan for picking me up at the airport and then taking me for delicious sushi. (I do love sushi) Laine showed up towards the end of the meal which was wonderful also.

But lets take a moment to go back a couple of days, yes? The tykes put on a show! And I have videos of it! It hadn't occurred to me before Wednesday just how difficult it is to take a video of a children's performance. It isn't that the kids are moving around so very much (we had them trained up good) so much as it is the parents popping up every ten seconds to take another picture of their *child!* Which, fair enough, but maybe we could have, like, a press corps section of the hall? All photographs and video cameras in a special designated area where they can just get in each other's way and not disrupt- you know *MY* video? Because I'm all greedy like that?

I will say that my favorite part of the video is during the reception performance when near the end one of the fathers waves his hand to get his tyke's attention and then when that fails to work he snaps. Um. Not like he got angry- he just clicked his fingers...never mind. C. also spends most of the video with her fingers up her nose. (By "trained up good" I mean that relatively speaking. They are only four after all.)

Anyhow- it was a riotous success and super fun, and if you're in Seattle you're more than welcome to come to see the videos which I can't put up online for obvious privacy reasons.

After the show we went to the staff Christmas lunch. I've never been to a proper work Christmas do before so that was very exciting. It was at a restaurant that was technically only a 10 minute walk from school- assuming you went in a reasonably straight line. The music teachers decided as a group not to take a taxi there with everyone else since it was snowing lightly and prettily. In retrospect we probably should have double checked that we knew where we were heading first. It took us about 40 minutes to walk there because we basically went in a giant, cold, snowy circle. What this *did* mean however is that when we finally arrived we were cheered. So alls well that ends well.

We had received an email that morning notifying us that the school had ordered enough wine for everyone to have about half a bottle each and if we wanted more alcohol after that we were just going to have to pay for it ourselves! Hmmph. I want to let you know that in order to set the stage for this next part- remember that there was a performance that morning and that in the lead up to the performance everyone in the basement early years section of the school had been listening to and singing these songs over and over and over and over and over (etc.) again. We were all waking up with the songs running through our head and and all falling asleep with them running through our heads still. There were two in particular that seemed to have special, sticky properties. Those were "Etoile de Noel" (Which is still stuck in my head) and "Snowflake Serenade"

So a group of tipsy early years teachers, a charming and beautiful young music teacher (that's me, guys), and snow dumping it down outside the window- my boss turned and pointed to me and said "this is your fault!" before leading a rousing rendition of Snowflake Serenade in a public restaurant while everyone was wearing colorful paper crowns from the Christmas crackers. Nice.